tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-81563052105922942392017-06-29T10:11:45.807-07:00Life UnfurnishedSMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.comBlogger82125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-28940234890099148312016-11-02T06:41:00.000-07:002016-11-02T06:44:24.653-07:00Making Memories'You gotta make your memories' - one of the schoolyard mothers, concluding an account of her family's day out. Another instance of the mode of suppression typical of the Neoliberal endgame: our willing, though unwitting, withdrawal from reality.<br /><br />As a mode of experience, the 'making memories' mode works effortlessly to replace our concern with the present with a concern with the future - how this event will be remembered. But it also works, and simultaneously, to replace our concern with the future: we do not think to set up a cause and effect relation with the future, our present actions are not chosen for the manner in which they will bring about change in the future; no - the future is nothing more than the scene of our present, the time at which we will experience the event we are not experiencing now except as an event that will be experienced in the future. But in the future the event will be experienced only as it was 'experienced' in the past (which it never was). And there it is: the contemporary displacement of the experience of reality by throwing it to a future time at which we will be too busy recalling an experience we never really had to attend to anything that is really happening then. The present deferred for a future defined as review of the past.<br /><br />The 'spin' of which the media and their politicians are often accused has by now infected us all. For what is spin but the repackaging of real events in a whirl of present, future and past such that those events <i>are</i>&nbsp;nothing other than that which they <i>will have been. </i>Not 'What will I say?', but 'What will I have said?' - Not 'What will I do?', but 'What will I have done?' You make your own memories and those of your readers, and those of your electorate...<br /><i><br /></i>A strong current in twentieth-century European philosophy would have it that <i>human</i>&nbsp;experience is defined by its being <i>concerned</i>, that is, by its being always <i>about something or someone</i>, by its being <i>in order to</i>, or <i>for</i>&nbsp;- by its being <i>intentional. </i>But this being <i>concerned</i> has now been seized upon and made to work against us, having been successfully entered into and refracted through highly determinate and closely managed categories that have replaced the more local, more organic - more <i>human</i>&nbsp;- categories that used to orient us in the past. Our society, in other words, has hacked into the way in which we were human, and is now, as a result, pulling all of our strings. That <i>twenty-first</i> century European philosophy would persuade us that the very notion of the 'human' is anachronistic and give its blessing of reason to the 'post-human,' may show that philosophy itself, and not for the first time, has been co-opted to buttress the status-quo.<br /><i><br /></i>Reality and the human - two concepts that we are now, explicitly and implicitly, being encouraged to believe are out of date.&nbsp;<i>&nbsp;</i>SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-33480343979685896062014-10-09T06:02:00.002-07:002014-10-09T06:02:43.711-07:00Sisyphus Doesn't Work Here AnymoreIt's a pretty stock tactic: present the young undergraduate students of Philosophy with the myth of Sisyphus, and tell them it's an allegory for human existence. <i>There's</i> a way to get their attention. <i>There's</i> a way to get them thinking. Except it's not. Because Sisyphus doesn't work here anymore.<br /><br />Camus really puts his heart into it, describing in visceral terms Sisyphus's struggle to push the boulder up the hill, only to see it roll back down again, <i>ad infinitum</i>: 'the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands.' All the better to emphasize the pointless exertion that is human existence when it is stripped of the absurd fictions we have employed to make it meaningful. No God, no Human Nature, no Truth, no Right, no Purpose. Just 'hopeless and futile labour.' Students used to feel outraged, disbelieving, bewildered. Now students feel nothing. They are unaffected.<br /><br />Why this is, is obvious once you think about it. It's not just that the undergraduate student of Philosophy has grown up without appeal to the grand narratives of old - no God for them; no Human Nature; no Truth, no Right, no Purpose, so any effort to disabuse them of these narratives is inevitably ineffective. It's that <i>what remains</i> after the grand narratives - 'hopeless and futile labour,' according to Camus - doesn't ring a bell with them either. 'Hopeless and futile labour, such that the only philosophical question left is why I don't commit suicide? What's wrong with Camus?! Life's <i>good</i>&nbsp;- why <i>would </i>I commit suicide? I'm having fun! I'm happy!' Poor Camus. And poor Sisyphus! Out of a job in a society for which life as uphill struggle simply doesn't resonate at all.<br /><br />Luckily, there's another myth that might just work. The Myth of Truman - given to us by <i>The Truman Show</i>&nbsp;(1998). For Truman, life is certainly not about rolling rocks up a hill - Life's good! Life's fun! 'Good morning, neighbours! And in case I don't see ya, good afternoon and goodnight!' But Truman is not a true man. He is artificially constructed for profit. His job's not a true job. His wife's not a true wife. His neighbour's aren't true neighbours. They're all just representations, to constitute a thin reality-film. Truman's is not a life of hopeless and futile <i>labour</i> - it's a life of hopeless and futile convenience, hopeless and futile happiness, hopeless and futile ease, given over without knowing it to the values of consumer capitalism such that relations even with his wife make sense only in the context of monetary gain. And as with Truman, so with us, absurd constructs of corporate interests. <br /><br /><i>This</i> is <i>The Truman Show. </i>And what is worse: the ratings are falling. Truman's life is less and less relevant to the pursuit of capitalism; its funding sources are drying up and the patience of the producers is wearing thin. Truman's just about suffered to keep going for now, in an increasingly dowdy and sparsely-furnished set and among increasingly badly-paid and disaffected actors, If only it were as easy with Truman as it was with Sisyphus: confront Sisyphus with his absurdity and he starts thinking about suicide - hopeless and futile labour isn't that easy to endure; but confront Truman with his absurdity and he just gets on with it anyway - hopeless and futile ease by definition&nbsp;<i>is</i>&nbsp;that easy to endure...No stones to struggle with here, just screens to switch on and sugar to slug down...<br /><br /><br />SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-82497797969231243552014-09-19T05:18:00.004-07:002014-09-19T05:18:51.684-07:00Generation-UnderstandingKnowing how and why we have the feelings we do is the definition of mental health these days, as we resolve to overcome the terrible denial and repression to which we attribute much of the psychological distress that human beings have had to suffer. And we have become very, very good at it, able not only to name the feeling that we are at any given moment experiencing - 'I feel very anxious right now' - but also to understand where it is that feeling comes from and the end at which it aims - 'I know that many women feel like this in the months after having a baby, as the expectancy and relief stages of pregnancy and childbirth leave a gap in their sense of meaning and purpose.' How <i>understanding </i>of ourselves and others we have become! - no longer at the mercy of our moods but able to talk their language, so to speak, and thereby to defuse their potential effects.<br /><br />But something is missing from this great achievement, of getting in touch with our feelings. <i>Feelings</i>&nbsp;are missing, having been almost entirely eradicated by knowledge, by awareness, by understanding, which are, in our society, taken much more seriously than the 'merely' emotional aspects of human experience. But feelings are very serious indeed, and it is important <i>not</i>&nbsp;to try to understand them! You see, the whole point about feelings is that they affect us and motivate us at least partially outside of the ways in which what we <i>know</i>&nbsp;affects and motivates us. What feelings do, therefore, is provide us with a rich and complex response to life and those around us that is not reducible to how we understand life and those around us. The necessity of living with those feelings, of adjusting them and ourselves in order to maintain a kind of equilibrium, results in our making changes to our lives and asking changes of others around us in a manner that is often productive of mutual respect, of depth of appreciation of each other and of a richness in living that we would never have been inspired to merely by what we <i>know. </i>The unknowable aspect of feelings, then, is wherein lies the force of their effect on our lives. To know them, by this account, is to diminish, if not entirely to remove, their effect. To understand our feelings is all but to annihilate the role that feeling has played in human existence.<br /><br />Many of us have long relinquished anything like the voice of the divine in the guidance of our affairs. But feelings served many of us as well, in shaping us in a way we could not quite account for - like a divine voice within, if you please. But secular society silences all such voices. And produces what is now referred to as 'generation-sensible,' the just-turning-adult cohort that is remarkable, we are told, for its avoidance of sex, drink and drugs, and its pursuit of academic and other worldly goals. Generation-without-feeling, in other words. Generation-<i>understanding</i>.&nbsp;SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-52449268409594075512014-03-20T08:49:00.002-07:002014-03-20T08:49:41.938-07:00Mental Illness in the Society of ControlFigures announced in August of last year revealed that, in many (Northern) towns in England in any given month, one adult in every six is prescribed antidepressants. If it does nothing else, this statistic once again raises questions about the significance of the word 'mental' in the designation 'mental illness.' The word 'illness,' we can understand; it places conditions like depression on a par with conditions like heart disease and cancer. But 'mental'? What can that mean? Of the mind, presumably, but what is the significance of that? Isn't the mind physical too? This is a big question, of course, but, since the default reaction these days is to treat the mind as if it <i>is</i> purely physical - antidepressants alter the chemical balance of the brain - we can at least conclude that medical orthodoxy, ordinary behaviour and government policy all agree that 'mind' illnesses are no different from 'heart' illnesses or 'stomach' illnesses. The question remains, then, as to what is implied by the catch-all qualifier 'mental' that isolates a certain range of conditions as somehow distinguishable from physical/purely physical conditions?<br /><br />What is implied is this: that conditions like depression, while being a matter of physical imbalance, are also - in ways that are poorly defined and rarely explicit - a matter of personal responsibility in some way. We are made to own these conditions in a manner that we are never made to own conditions like heart disease (despite the fact that heart disease is often the result of lifestyle choices, a fact of which almost nobody can now be unaware). The various psycho-therapies, relatively rarely sponsored by the NHS, are premised upon this, with their reliance on a long-drawn out testimony on the part of the patient and a tendency to locate the origins of the 'mental' illness in an event/events construed as utterly determining. Your 'mental' illness is <i>yours, </i>and was always destined to &nbsp;be <i>yours</i>, in a manner that 'physical' illnesses rarely are. A vaguely articulated atmosphere of personal responsibility, and therefore of guilt, pervades the very concept of 'mental' illness, an atmosphere that belies the rhetoric of 'understanding' that surrounds our society's ever-increasing doling out of pills to help alter certain psychological experiences.<br /><br />The fact that Cognitive Behaviour Therapy has become the NHS therapy of choice is, in this context, telling - a therapy whose commitment to altering ways of thinking and therefore of behaving emphasizes the importance of norms and function. CBT is premised upon there being standards of behaviour which it is undesirable to fall short of, and upon the absolute value of fitting in and putting the next foot forward. A therapy, then, that combines the controlling effects of guilt-dissemination and normalization - a realization of Foucault's claim that 'mental' illness occurs half-way between medicine and morality as a significantly ambiguous and sinister mix of innocent determinism and culpable freedom. You can't do anything about your depression - hence the horrifying numbers that agree to the pills - yet you are also guilty, of its causes and its effects. That this guilt is now as pervasive as it is poorly defined no doubt explains the relative increase in pill-prescription and decrease in therapy provision - the term 'mental' nowadays more or less does the trick on its own. No more costly apparatus is needed to continue to make us feel as if <i>we</i>&nbsp;are the ones who are 'down.' &nbsp; SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-88505339818552887052014-03-18T11:55:00.004-07:002014-03-19T04:15:35.989-07:00Common Sense Lite<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">For the Victorians, <i>taste</i>was a moral achievement; conformity to standards – of dress, of décor, of demeanour – part and parcel of an upstanding life and character. To us, this seems highly conservative and judgmental – we are committed to a degree of individualized aesthetic experience that makes the conformity of previous times feel oppressive, and, insofar as we form explicit moral impressions of anyone or anything, we do not form them on the basis of, say, choice of colour for the sitting-room walls. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Yet it is perfectly rational to argue that taste is a moral, and not just an aesthetic achievement: as Kant explained, a person’s willingness to submit to a consensus view when there is, as in matters aesthetic, <i>no</i> rule of reason to follow but only a shared sense, a common experience, is a very good sign of that person’s being more than likely to submit to a consensus view when there <i>is</i>, as in matters moral, a rule of reason to follow. If you subjugate your will in the matter of colour for the sitting room walls, on the basis of a <i>common sense</i> for what is beautiful, then you are unlikely not to subjugate your will in the matter of right and wrong, on the strength of a universal reason for what is good.&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">And to what, after all, does our contemporary so-called freedom of choice amount? A great eclecticism? A dynamic experimentalism? If anything defines the aesthetic in our time, it is rather a stultifying genericism: in dress, in décor, in demeanour too. Conformity, then, still obtains – a mass and mind-blowing conformity of which the Victorians could not have dreamed. So the difference between us and the Victorians lies not, after all, in the advent of freedom of thought and expression, but in the explicit attribution of moral import to conformity in matters aesthetic. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This makes all the difference in the world. What is striking about contemporary genericism is its terrible thinness, its awful convenience, its flattened-out ease. ‘Boys and their toys,’ said with a smile between women of their men; ‘He’s at that stage,’ pronounced with no real idea of what stage that might be and whether he’s really at it, among mothers over cappuccinos; ‘The well-being of our students is our first priority,’ stated with no commitment to well-being, on every university brochure in the land. The generic mode is both impossible to object to – it is almost always positive – and utterly alienating, at least of any concern with content, any real engagement. It is the steel-magnolia mode of our times – saccharine sweet and absolutely forbidding of any dissent, the aesthetic equivalent of the ‘there is no alternative’ of contemporary capitalism. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">There <i>is</i>, then, also an attribution of moral import to our time’s mode of conformity, but it is not an explicit attribution, and it is assigned on the thinnest of grounds, with no sense at all for the moral relevance of the content to be conformed to; there is nowadays only an implied insistence on the moral relevance of conformity itself. We have no notion of why it is that IKEA-style furnishings should have about them anything of a moral nature, and yet we have an absolute and very defensive sense that they do. The Victorians, on the other hand, had strong notions of why, say, a bustle to the rear of a woman’s skirts was of moral import, and this gave a depth to their insistence on conformity that our age is utterly without. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In the end, it is hard to really value what comes too easily. For the Victorians, standards of dress, of décor, and of demeanour were difficult to achieve: try producing crisp white linens in a dark and smoky home without electricity; try achieving a calm and spacious parlour in a two-up-two-down, housing a family of six. Hard won, to say the least. And therefore just the kind of indicator of a moral person that Kant understood the sense of taste to be. And think now of the shameful convenience of our choosing from H&amp;M’s exhaustive range of cheaply sold ‘jeggings,’ while sitting on the couch watching X-Factor, or the terrible thoughtlessness of our conversations, as we sign up to a ‘global’ conformism, a ‘global’ common sense, that is as binding as it is <i>lite</i>, as steely as it is magnolia.</span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Contemporary moral life is degraded and degrading. It is born of no resistance, except that offered by the great wall of genericism. It is not formative, because it has nothing to do with substance. It is premised on outlines of people, not on people. And it makes outlines of people, not people. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></div>SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-38720502254486338242013-05-10T05:52:00.001-07:002013-05-10T05:56:13.347-07:00Non-Stop InanityThe society of control never leaves anything alone for very long. Whereas, in the disciplinary mode, trust was placed in the institutions of discipline (the university, for instance), now those institutions are crumbling around a let's-keep-each-other-in-the-loop lack of trust, masquerading as transparency, openness, accountability, and downright sincerity.<br /><br />A voracious culture of auditing has been with us for some time now, in which a worker in one of the institutions of discipline (the university, for instance) has been required to submit, at least three times already in this academic year, details of her qualifications, teaching, and research...each time in a format sufficiently different to prevent the possibility of cut-and-paste.<br /><br />But this kind of auditing, which can seem sufficiently authoritarian to appear as a natural extension of the disciplinary mode rather than its demise, is now gradually softening its expression, relaxing its muscles, exchanging work clothes for a 'one-sie', and sending around an email asking you to name your favourite ice-cream and to submit a fun photo of yourself (a baby-photo, for instance). <a href="http://www.zero-books.net/books/non-stop-inertia">Non-stop inertia</a> just came out as non-stop inanity.<br /><br />But, for all its 'uggs' and foolish smiles, for all its text-speak and first-name calling, the control-machine is no less complex than the disciplinary. In former times, the mode whereby our subjection to power was bearable was as an expression of our inner, true self: <i>I was made for being a teacher. </i>The structure of this bearableness was taken from the societies of sovereignty that preceded the disciplinary style, in which, so long as one was out from under the yolk of the law - so long as one was thinking and acting for oneself - one was free. In the discplinary mode, it was precisely when one was acting thinking and acting <i>for oneself</i>&nbsp;that one was subjected - but the disciplinary mode flourished because thinking and acting for oneself<i> felt</i> like freedom!<br /><br />Now, think of this: The request for the name of your favourite ice-cream and for a picture of you as a baby is made, and is supposed to be felt, as if it is a great and unusual concession on your part to provide such a thing - there is an amusing frisson of transgression - <i>How funny and intriguing, the teacher likes cookie-dough flavour</i>! But this frisson is only the way in which control is bearable, for the idea of 'the teacher' is a disciplinary one, already thoroughly anachronistic. No-one, now, is above naming their favourite ice-cream and showing their baby-photo - control is a great leveller in this regard. But this situation is acceptable to us to the extent that it feels that, in naming our favourite ice-cream and showing our baby-photo, we are making a grand exception, just this once, and coming down to the level of the 'common man'. Inanity is beneath noone now. It is, rather, our basic and ongoing condition, which is made endurable because it feels like a fun exception to the rule. SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-65708041647007261332013-04-12T07:02:00.003-07:002013-04-12T07:02:30.479-07:00No Such Thing as Society; No Such Thing as the SelfMargaret Thatcher famously claimed that 'there is no such thing as society,' and those on the Left, rightly, regret the gradual and continuing unravelling in our times, of the ties that used to bind us together: where we lived, how we lived, what we worked at, who we knew, what we hoped and believed...In the wake of Thatcher's passing, those with sense and courage enough to speak out are giving expression to this regret, describing the greedy <i>individualism</i>, the elbows-and-knees <i>selfishness,</i> that they believe to have resulted from neoliberal capitalism's unrelenting assault on the social fabric; see <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01rwy5l/Question_Time_11_04_2013/">Polly Toynbee on BBC's <i>Question Time</i>&nbsp;last night</a>, or <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDtClJYJBj8">Glenda Jackson's speech to the House of Commons on Wednesday</a>.&nbsp;But this regret, admirable though it may be, is mistaken. For Margaret Thatcher's politics destroyed, not just the forces that bound us together, but also those that made us stand apart: if there is no such thing as society, then <i>there is no such thing as the self</i>; selfishness and individualism are, in fact, no longer possible.<br /><br />Like society as we know it, the self was a disciplinary phenomenon: constituted by a range of identifications that worked to individualize as they worked to normalize. In becoming a nurse (<i>really</i> becoming one, in that transformative manner that is no longer possible under the pile of paperwork that dominates the job), one was both subject to the norms of the profession and defined by those norms in a manner that contributed to <i>who one was</i>. And, since one was never only a nurse, but also lower-middle-class, urban, a mother, Catholic, and so on and so on, one was entered into the endless discrete networks that went both to bind one into society and to isolate one as an individual in one's own right. There were millions like you, but you were like nobody else in the world. Dissolving the identifications that constituted society, then, simultaneously dissolves the identifications that constituted the self.<br /><br />It is crucial that we realize this, for, as things stand, the notion that individualism is still possible is one of the most powerful fictions of our time, the very mode whereby we find our situation tolerable. We may express dismay at the extent to which society has broken up into loose networks of individuals, but we feel comforted too at the liberatory potential of a force of individualism, a core of self, that is our ground zero, the mode of being below which we will not stoop. In his otherwise enlightening <i>The Enigma of Capital</i>, David Harvey describes as one of the necessaries, but also one of the few remaining blockages, to the flow of capital, 'the sovereign individual,' whose 'freedom' generates the entrepreneurial activities upon which capitalism thrives but whose deeper identifications 'are perpetually at odds with the crass commercialisms' of the markets. But 'the sovereign individual' is the blight and the comfort of an era that is no longer ours. If Foucault observed that we required, in disciplinary times, to cut off the head of the king (for the king was, in those times, an anachronism), then we are required, in these times, to cut off the head of the individual (for the individual is, in these times, an anachronism).<br /><br />There is, now, no such thing as society, only the most precarious of bonds forged in opportunism and cynicism; and there is, now, no such thing as the self, only the most passing and changeful of identifications rooted in low-lying fear and an empty nostalgia for belonging. But one thing does remain: insofar as a single person can be responsible for such an epochal falling off, Margaret Thatcher is that person.SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-13756445007344471212013-03-08T07:40:00.000-08:002013-03-08T15:30:52.317-08:00Out In The Open, But Not OurselvesThe scandal surrounding revelations of the sexual activities of Cardinal Keith O' Brien is yet another in the litany of sex scandals that have dogged the Catholic church in recent years; indeed, the sudden retirement of Pope Benedict has been attributed to his having been exhausted and disillusioned by the public disgrace that has been the consequence.<br /><br />But, before we throw another stone at the Catholic Church, we ought to consider what conditions are now in place that make the revelation of these sex scandals both possible and necessary. Are we simply more <i>enlightened</i> now, <i>freer</i> to break from institutions of authority that had such a hold over us for all those years?<br /><br />Foucault begins <i>Discipline and Punish </i>with a vivid description of the spectacularly awful hanging, drawing and quartering of Damiens the regicide. He follows this description by detailing the calm and modest workings of the modern prison, with its constant redistribution of criminals in space and time. Did we, between the years 1750 and 1850, become suddenly more <i>enlightened</i>?, Foucault asks. Did we suddenly become so much more <i>humane</i>?<br /><br />Not at all, is Foucault's reply. For, if we suspend for a moment our stone-throwing horror at the apparent barbarity of the 18th-century treatment of criminals, then we may begin to see how <i>reasonable</i> such spectacular cruelty really was, how much it made sense. In a feudal-style monarchy, with little opportunity of placing before the people, the king and his right to rule, much had to be made of the few occasions on which the people might feel the god-like power of the king and on which the god-like power of the king might be reconstituted: spectacular excess was the only way, when it came to kingly attire, kingly architecture, and kingly punishment. Once we realize this, Foucault says, we begin to be capable of looking again at the modern prison, with its <i>enlightened</i>, its <i>humane</i>, routines, as constitutive of another kind of power than the kingly one, a kind of power in which spectacle and excess are replaced by surveillance and reserve.<br /><br />What, then, of sex and the Catholic Church? Was it all barbarity and aberration, or was it, in fact, a necessary, a <i>reasonable</i>, element in the workings of a society? The societies that grew up in the wake of the old-style monarchies were, as Foucault tells it, <i>disciplinary</i>&nbsp;in their nature, and gave rise to modes of social, economic, political and cultural life with which we continue to be familiar, or for the passing of which we are now often nostalgic: the family, the home, education, health...all these, as we know them, are disciplinary possibilities. And what they all have in common is a defining <i>tension</i>: between individuation and normalization, between formation and exclusion, between suppression and transgression. In the disciplinary society, what we came to understand as a fully-realized and mature existence&nbsp;emerged for the first time as a possibility, where full realization and maturity had simultaneously normalizing and individualizing effects, simultaneously galvanizing and isolating effects, simultaneously expressive and repressive effects: one went forth to be a soldier, which opened before one whole forms of togetherness but also made it difficult to fit in to civilian life; one became a mother, which offered untold comforts but excluded one, to some extent, from the 'adult' world; one trained to be a doctor, which was stimulating and rewarding but also time-consuming and over-determining, etc. etc. Normalization and individuation; formation and exclusion; togetherness and isolation. But, through all of this, as the <i>rationale</i> of all of this, there emerged the idea of <i>the</i> <i>true self -</i>&nbsp;<i>who I really am -</i>&nbsp;that is, the truth about all of the inconsistencies and the tensions that inevitably proceeded from the fact that we embraced not just one form of individuality in our lifetime, but many. The emergence of psycho-therapy through the nineteenth century is no coincidence; the rationale of disciplinary society's constitution of individuals with both internal and external fault lines was that <i>the truth will out</i>, that <i>there is, inside all of this, a real me</i>.<br /><br />And this was where sex came in. Or rather,<i>&nbsp;sexuality and its analogues</i>.&nbsp;Sexuality operated in disciplinary societies precisely as the mode of truth about ourselves, the nature of the&nbsp;<i>real me</i>,&nbsp;as that which was other than the forms of individuality into which we were entered. It was frowned upon, but also necessary; taboo but essential. It was why and how we were transgressive; but it was also why and how we were submissive, for it was the way in which we understood ourselves as being more than disciplinary, and as having an underlying coherence despite the painful fault-lines of our lives. <i>And</i>&nbsp;it was also, of course, another discipline, the various modes of sexuality offering as many forms of individuation and normalization, of togetherness and isolation, of expression and repression, as the various modes, say, of work. <i>Coming out</i>, then, was the basic trajectory of truth in disciplinary societies, the basic movement of resistance, which simultaneously reentered us into the disciplinary machine and allowed that machine to let off steam. A brilliant mechanism! And not at all irrational, or out of control. And the church - with its simultaneous contempt for sex, and focus on sex as that which, observed and documented, expressed the truth about our souls - was, together with its secular equivalents in the various psycho-therapies, the incubator of the sexuality-effect, the institution of discipline's truth, whose smoke and mirrors kept alive the disciplinary dream of <i>the real me</i>.&nbsp;The misdemeanours of a Cardinal O' Brien were, then, no simple aberration, no more irrational and out of control than were the sexual and analagously-sexual truth practices of the secular population of disciplinary societies. Which, we may presume, was why they were not 'uncovered' for all those years. The hidden truth was <i>the</i> form of self-knowledge in the disciplinary mode; it was the way we kept our sanity; it was the way we were kept 'sane.'<br /><br />But being, now, post-disciplinary, <i>the real me</i> no longer requires to <i>come out</i> from under its various formations, no longer needs to reconcile that variety in another but very special, because 'true,' formation, because the very notion of the real me no longer applies. One is 'free' now, say, to be gay, not because it's okay to come out but because you don't have to come out, because you can't come out, because there is no longer a strong concept of 'you,' of the truth about 'you,' to do the coming out. Such as we are now, we are collections of wants and behaviours, the more fleeting and exchangeable the better, all the better to consume more and more. The late-capitalist continuing requirement for compound growth has overcome, among many barriers to the flow of capital, the barrier presented by the individuation and normalization effects of discipline: someone who <i>is</i>&nbsp;(<i>at heart</i>, we say) a fisherman will buy some things so long as he <i>comes out </i>as a fisherman; but a passing and exchangeable enthusiasm for fishing - easily compatible with many other passing and exchangeable enthusiasms - will buy many many more things and not care whether those things were produced very cheaply indeed.<br /><br />So, the individual is gone. And with the individual, the 'truth' about the individual - his necessarily hidden, dark, and endlessly-requiring-to-be-confessed <i>sexuality</i>. We look back at that 'truth' now with a righteous horror. How far we have come, we think to ourselves. How much more enlightened we now are...SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-77275533836694852302013-01-29T07:12:00.000-08:002013-01-29T07:12:08.301-08:00The Thinking of Modern Life<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">In New Left Review’s Mar/Apr 2012 issue, there appeared an article by T.J Clark (‘For A Left With No Future’) and a reply to that article, by Susan Watkins (‘Presentism?’). What follows is a reply to Watkins’ reply, which considers <i>the</i> issue that divides Clark and Watkins, that is, the issue of what it is to think seriously in, and of, modern life. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">The central claim of <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s article is that the left has no future. For this claim, <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>gives both <i>reasons</i> and a<i> response</i>. His <i>reasons</i> have to do with the left’s mistaken understanding of the past and the present; his <i>response</i> is to adopt what he calls a ‘tragic perspective.’ Watkins, for her part, is almost entirely critical of Clark’s claim – and of the reasons he gives for it, and of the response he recommends to it – by virtue of conducting a deeper inquiry into the materials that <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> draws upon in his support. But what I aim to show is that despite, <i>and also because of</i>, Watkins’ deeper inquiry, Clark’s argument is, in large part, vindicated, at least insofar as it points to what is now our range of options for effective intellectual engagement with the conditions of our time. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 18.0pt;">*<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">I would begin, however, by making two vital adjustments to <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s position. The first involves its immeasurable expansion, so that it is made to apply, not only to the left in our time, but to <i>the defining mode of experience more generally </i>in our time. In other words, if Clark’s claim is that the left has no future, I would simply claim that <i>we have no future</i> – for the same <i>reasons</i>that Clark identifies, reasons to do with our understanding of the past and the present; and with at least something of the same <i>response </i>that Clark recommends, that is, the assumption of a ‘tragic perspective.’<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">But the second adjustment that I would make is to this very notion, of a ‘tragic perspective.’ Further elucidation of the notion is required if <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s argument is to be understood. And my suggestion is this: for the phrase ‘tragic perspective,’ we insert the phrase ‘historical perspective.’ In doing so, the real strength of <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s argument is elicited. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 18.0pt; line-height: 150%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">As might be expected, there is a direct link between the <i>reasons</i> Clark gives for his no-future claim and the <i>response</i> he proposes to it; a clear understanding of the former, then, is necessary to a fair assessment of the latter. And the <i>reasons</i>are twofold, having to do, first, with Clark’s account of <i>human history</i> and, second, with <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s account of <i>modern life</i>. In short, what we learn from the past and what we see in the present ought, in <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s view, to persuade us to a mode of thinking modest enough to relinquish its reliance upon the future. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 18.0pt; line-height: 150%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">And so to the first of <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s reasons for claiming that the left has no future: the nature of human history. Clark’s conviction here is simply stated: if history shows us nothing else, it shows us that human beings are <i>finite</i>, and consequently subject to such a degree of complex contingency that we proceed, ultimately, without trajectory, without purpose, without progress, and therefore without a determinate future. Of the twentieth century, for example, <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> asks: ‘Did the century’s horrors have a shape? Did they obey a logic or follow from a central determination – however much the contingencies of history intervened?’ They did not, is <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s unequivocal response. The period, he says, was rather ‘catastrophe in the strict sense – unfolding pell-mell from <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Sarajevo</st1:place></st1:city>on...a chaos formed from an unstoppable, unmappable criss-cross of forces.’ But Watkins’ response to <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s response is also unequivocal. Clark’s view of history is unacceptable, she says: first, because it installs ‘irrationalism <i>tout court</i>’ at the heart of human effort, and ‘irrationalism is a bad starting-point for any political perspective’; second, because the events that dominated the twentieth century, for example, <i>are </i>‘amenable to rational investigation and analysis,’ which investigation and analysis are, in fact, our ‘intellectual duty.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">But Watkins, I would argue, has <i>over</i>read <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s understanding of history. <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> does say that there is no ‘heart of the matter’ of history. But for this to amount to the installing of ‘irrationalism’ as the defining feature of history, ‘rationalism’ would have to be limited to the identification or presumption of a ‘heart of the matter’ of history. If what <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> says is true, however, this would make ‘rationalism’ into the most irrational thing of all!: the identification or presumption of a ‘heart of the matter’ of history, where none exists. Of course, there are <i>interpretations</i> of history, more or less convincing, interesting, or relevant accounts of how particular events or forces went to shape what was to come. But these are, precisely, <i>interpretations</i>, that is, finite understandings not god’s-eye views. As such, they are just some, among many possible, ways of cutting up the historical cake, which cake has, in fact, no centre. And though finite understandings may be, as Watkins says, ‘a bad starting-point for any political perspective,’ what is there to say to this but, ‘So be it! They are, at any rate, the only starting-point we have.’ We may dream of a ‘rational’ politics, with more absolute knowledge at its disposal, but it is part of the lesson that Clark would teach us, that it is rather such <i>dreaming</i> that is the bad starting-point for politics, and partly responsible for the ineffectual condition of the left in our time, whose optimism is now the orthodox ‘political tonality,’ defining an age, our age, marked by ‘an endless political and economic Micawberism.’&nbsp; ‘Utopias,’ <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> says (and he would certainly call Watkins’ presumption of a ‘rational’ politics, utopian), ‘reassure modernity as to its infinite potential. But why? It should learn – be taught – to look failure in the face.’<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">You may object, however, that all of this follows only from the assumption that Clark’s understanding of history, as ‘unfolding pell-mell,’ is truer than Watkins’ understanding of history, as subject to ‘rational analysis.’ And why assume this? Well, first of all, because it is <i>Watkins’</i> understanding of history that is the grander of the two, and therefore the one on which there is a much greater obligation to prove itself. But also, because Clark’s understanding of history has by now, I believe, the greater philosophical support, not least from a certain Nietzschean tradition, which Watkins identifies as so important to <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>. (The fact that, as Watkins points out, Nietzsche was not always so important to <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>, is no great matter; it is in the nature of a thinking man that he be prepared to develop, even to alter, his ways of thinking.) Michel Foucault, for example, a well-known proponent of a Nietzschean understanding of history, would say that the properly <i>historical</i>perspective is the one that puts aside the search for a ‘heart of the matter’ of history, an origin and an end, and sets itself the ‘grey’ and ‘meticulous’ (Foucault), the ‘ordinary’ and ‘endemic’ (Clark), work of learning from history and diagnosing the present without resting upon the ‘large and well-meaning errors’ (Nietzsche) that have all too often served as a ground for us to stand upon.&nbsp;(See Foucault,&nbsp;<i>The Order of Things)</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">All by way of showing, that Watkins’ ‘rational analysis’ of the origins of the First World War, which she provides in order to contradict Clark’s understanding of history as ‘pell-mell,’ is perfectly compatible with Clark’s understanding of history as ‘pell-mell’; it is one interpretation, among many possible, of a passage of time that was subject to so many forces that its overriding and accurate mapping is beyond our human capacity. There are, I feel certain Watkins would allow, more than one even well-established account of the origins of the First World War. <i>That </i>is what it means to be human: to be contingent upon a historical unfolding so complex that we, its actors, are always also acted upon, whether we are involved or <i>investigating</i>, whether we are running for our lives or engaged in <i>rational analysis</i>. In the words of the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose life spanned the entire of the century about which Clark and Watkins disagree so completely, and who, at his best, might also be numbered among the Nietzscheans of history: ‘We are always affected, whether in hope or fear, by what is nearest to us.’&nbsp;(<i>Truth and Method</i>)&nbsp;Even our ‘rational’ analyses of the past are as <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>describes our visions of the future: ‘haunted by their worldly realities,’ ‘heavy and ordinary and present-centred.’ Finite, historical, <i>human</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">And what follows from this understanding of history as <i>human</i>, but the inevitability of <i>conflict</i>? With dreams of a ‘rational’ history go dreams of a peaceful humanity; hence <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s claim for the inherence of violence and war. Now, Watkins once again <i>over</i>reads this claim, characterizing it as a claim for violence as the innate and all-encompassing determinant of human history, as ‘our timeless urge’ and ‘the motor of civilization.’ But <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s aim is merely to persuade us that the infinity of human capacities ‘is for bad as much as good.’ Nothing could be clearer: <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> urges us to accept that violence, conflict, ferocity, war are <i>as fundamental </i>to human existence as are generosity, freedom and care.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><st1:place w:st="on"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Clark</span></st1:place><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;"> takes A. C. Bradley as giving us the most appropriate model of the tragic for our times. And for Bradley, as Watkins points out, tragedy arises from ‘the war of good with good.’ But from where does ‘the war of good with good’ spring, but the <i>finite</i> nature of human existence, for which there is no overriding telos, no ‘rational’ ground on which to justify the expectation that two goods will be mutually compatible. When there is no grand logic to the unfolding of history, when there is no god’s-eye view to secure the basic positions, when there is no ‘heart of the matter,’ then two rights cannot be guarantee not to make a wrong. Indeed, there is not even the guarantee that ‘right,’ that peace and forgiveness, will not <i>on its own</i>be degrading, nor that ‘wrong,’ that violence and conflict, will not <i>on its own</i> be positive and productive. For this insight, we do not have to go as far back as to Kant, who argued for the morally uplifting effects of war; David Harvey recently argued in interview for the galvanizing effects on modern urban environments of a degree of conflict more or less unknown to the ‘cappuccino pacification’ of most Western cities.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 18.0pt; line-height: 150%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">So much for Clark’s first reason for claiming that the left has no future; the left, <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> implies, has mistaken human history as being subject to overriding trajectories and, therefore, as potentially to be rid of all conflict. <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>has a second reason for claiming that the left has no future, a reason to do with the failure of the left to fully appreciate <i>the nature of modern life</i>. According to Clark, the societies we live in have reconstituted whole populations, as comprised of ‘a new kind of isolate obedient “individual” with technical support to match,’ populations held together only by ‘a fiction of full existence to come,’ rather than by social and political aptitudes; the left, in its failure to face up to this, to <i>modern life</i>, has lost the relevance it may once have had, if only because its optimism, its ‘fictions of full existence to come,’ are now the stuff of status quo. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">But Watkins is sceptical of <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s account of modern life. Here is her response: <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 36.0pt;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">[M]odernity in [<st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s] work is endowed with truly Weberian grimness – which is not to say that it has acquired conceptual coherence. Lacking any satisfactory definition, or agreement over its sphere of application (culture, ethos, social order), causes (Protestantism, capitalism, consumerism) or periodization (end of feudalism, Enlightenment, 1850, 1905), modernity has come to function as a pseudo-concept, a placeholder that averts the need for deeper enquiry; or a way of speaking about capitalism without mentioning the term...<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><st1:place w:st="on"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Clark</span></st1:place><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">’s descriptions of modern life are, for Watkins, inadequate, because they do not have the kind of ‘conceptual coherence’ that is, for Watkins, the measure of adequacy. They do not posit sufficiently the origins of modern life, nor delineate sufficiently its jurisdiction. They are no more than <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s <i>impressions</i>, we might say, and generate just that kind of <i>irrational</i> account that makes for a very bad starting-point for politics. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">So, does its lack of ‘coherence,’ its somewhat indeterminate and shifting nature, make <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s idea of ‘modernity’ into a ‘placeholder,’ as Watkins says? Yes!, a placeholder for as many of the ways as we can think of, in which modern life works in the manner that Clark describes: to instil a ‘general infantilization of human needs and purposes’; to prove itself ‘integral to consumer capitalism’; to effect ‘a terrible emptying and sanitizing of the imagination’; to make meaning into ‘a scarce social commodity’; to bring about ‘the de-skilling of everyday life’; and we might add: to ‘free’ us into a precarious world of immaterial work and zero-hour contracts; to preoccupy us with the micro-management of everything under a sheen of 24-hour coverage and consumer choice; and so on and so on. There are brilliant account of this, modern life, available, for example in the writings of the Italian radical thinkers, Berradi, Virno and others. Like them, what Clark aims to give is a ‘plain’ treatment of modern life, one that resonates with us, one that looks familiar but that makes the familiar clearer, more comprehensible, even as, indeed <i>because</i>, it lacks the kind of ‘heart of the matter’ ‘coherence’ that Watkins demands. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Does this make <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s idea of ‘modernity,’ or any other idea used as a placeholder for effects like those listed above, into a ‘pseudo-concept,’ as Watkins says? No!, or only if you continue, as Watkins does, to look for ‘conceptual coherence.’ Watkins describes Clark’s idea of ‘modernity’ as ‘Weberian,’ and then, almost immediately, criticizes <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s idea for not sticking to a ‘Weberian’ path. But <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s reply would surely be to say: ‘That is your problem. It was you who called me “Weberian.” And it is you who demands the kind of “conceptual coherence” with which I and history are unconcerned.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Watkins regards <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s unconcern as licentious, even as lazy. Of <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s idea of ‘modernity,’ she writes: it is ‘a way of speaking that averts the need for deeper inquiry.’ But this takes us, now, to the heart of the matter of this essay at least, that is, to the question of <i>whether it is ‘the need for deeper inquiry’ that is now our greatest weakness, and the reason why we seem unable to think clearly enough to alter our condition</i>. In other words, what if it is ‘the need for deeper inquiry’ that must, of all our needs, be averted, for something rather than nothing to now be possible? What if our ‘intellectual duty,’ as Watkins calls it, of ‘rational investigation and analysis,’ is now the chain that binds our thinking? To borrow an image from Wittgenstein, what if <i>keeping the engine idling</i> is what is making us unable, now, to move ourselves from here? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">If this seems rather hysterical a reaction, then have a look at what results from the ‘deeper inquiry’ into modern life that Watkins implies is necessary: ‘No uniform ethos, habitus or particular way of being human,’ Watkins writes, ‘is discernible across this varied landscape.’ <i>Nothing results</i>, in other words: no, even somewhat indeterminate and shifting, description of modern life is given; no, even somewhat incoherent, idea of modern life is proposed. And all the while, increasing numbers continue to fall victim to the thin reality of consumer capitalism, and submit themselves to working under ever-more-precarious conditions, and find themselves in the grip of institutional and/or pharmaceutical regimes as a solution to their impossibly insubstantial individuality...Rather than employ a ‘placeholder’ to give expression to urgent aspects of modern life, Watkins would keep the engine idling. And so, we go nowhere and do nothing. And all because of ‘the need for deeper inquiry.’<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">As for <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s idea of ‘modernity’ being ‘a way of speaking about capitalism without mentioning the term,’ it is odd that Watkins suggests this as a criticism. The obvious response is, ‘Of course it is! Insofar as capitalism is now the dominant form of social, political, economic and cultural organization, how could any description of modern life not be “a way of speaking about capitalism”?’ We have been taught to shy away from ‘placeholder’ terms like ‘modernity’ and ‘capitalism,’ as if they are so encompassing and so bandied-about as to be naive, even offensive, both too comprehensive and too comprehensible to deserve the name of thinking. But the thinking of modern life must not shy away from such terms. For, though they may be, to use Clark’s word, ‘plain,’ this need not mean, to use <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s word, ‘banal.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">And so we have the second reason that Clark gives for claiming that the left has no future: the nature of modern life, which has reconstituted whole populations to be unfit for the societies the left envisages, and which would, at any rate, incorporate the left’s utopianism into the controlling futurism that is its defining orientation. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 18.0pt; line-height: 150%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">To summarize the dispute between Clark and Watkins, as it has thus far emerged, we might simply observe, that while <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>is shy of history and confident of modern life, Watkins is confident of history and shy of modern life. And why this? What is the kernel of this difference between Clark and Watkins? It is, simply, the ‘rational’ requirement for ‘conceptual coherence.’ ‘Conceptual coherence’ is, for Watkins, the measure of reason. In claiming this coherence (misguidedly <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>would argue, and I agree) for interpretations of history, she recasts history as ‘rational’ and human effort as capable of ‘rational’ analysis. But this ‘luxury of hindsight’ as we call it naturally is not afforded by the present; hence, Watkins’ demand for ‘conceptual coherence’ will not say anything further about modern life than that nothing, nothing ‘rational’ at least, can be said about modern life. Meanwhile, the ‘tragic,’ or as I would call it ‘historical,’ perspective that prevents Clark from drawing grand conclusions about the past is the same perspective that allows Clark, that compels him even, to draw grand conclusions about the present. From the historical perspective, though we acknowledge that we humans have little capacity to control the outcome of our thoughts and actions, we judge it better that we go forth from here with something rather than nothing at all for our sustenance and protection; meanwhile, the desire for ‘conceptual coherence’ is in danger of making ‘great if well-meaning errors’ about history and maintaining great if well-meaning silences about modern life. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">As I see it, then, the really significant conclusion to be drawn from the debate between Clark and Watkins is: that we finite humans <i>are not</i> as we finite humans <i>must do</i>; in other words, that there is a certain <i>style</i> now required of us, which is not directly consistent with the <i>substance </i>of what we know. Clark’s <i>claim</i> is that the left has no future; <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s recommended <i>response</i> is for the left to think and act <i>as if</i> it has no future. But what is crucial to realize is that <i>it is not the same kind of thing</i>, to accept that we have no future and to think and act as if we have no future. The former is an achievement of <i>abstraction</i>; the latter, an achievement of <i>application</i>. And abstraction and application are not, not anymore at least, the same kind of thing. It is because of her failure to realize this that Watkins is incapable of thinking of modern life. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Let us proceed, then, with this in mind, from our examination of the reasons Clark gives for his no-future claim, to an examination of the nature of the claim itself (the abstract achievement Clark demands of us) and of the response that Clark would have us give (the applied achievement that Clark demands of us). <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 18.0pt; line-height: 150%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">First, to the abstract move that Clark expects us to make, that is, the realization that the left has no future: based on his understanding of the nature of the past and the nature of the present, Clark would have us accept that any effort on our part to anticipate a future is subject to such a degree of historical contingency and weakened to such a degree by contemporary opportunism and futurism that it cannot be relied upon either to constitute or to predict a future for us. In this sense, we are, as <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> would have it, without a future; we are without a future that can be allowed as a justification for our plans, our projects and our principles. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">It is hardly surprising that, having criticized the reasons <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> gives for making this claim, Watkins then criticizes the claim itself, which she regards as making little sense. Firstly, it makes little <i>ontological </i>sense, she says – ‘futurity is a constitutive dimension of human experience...while any effective action embodies in itself a difference between “then” and “now.”’ This first criticism amounts to the objection that, as Heidegger famously put it, we humans are ‘thrown,’ and have an orientation towards future, a sense of purpose, as a basic feature of our experience. But this objection cannot be allowed as an objection to <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s position. For, far from denying future-orientedness of this kind, <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s position presupposes it (while also admitting that we humans are equally oriented towards the past; for Heidegger, we are thrown <i>into</i> a situation as well as being thrown forward from it). What Clark would have us dispense with are the <i>purposeless</i>purposes, the contentless futures, invoked by the kind of utopian visions that he identifies in left-wing thinking (and that I would identify as a feature of modern life more generally), visions that amount to no less than ‘the wish for escape from mortal existence,’ as Clark puts it, by putting before us a future that would erase the conditions of our present (by refusing to acknowledge that we humans are thrown <i>into </i>a situation as well as being thrown forward from it). The <i>response</i> that Clark recommends amounts, as we shall see, to a version of reformism, an effort to change, step by step, and failure by failure, aspects of our current condition. Quite clearly, this response presupposes an orientation towards the future, an acceptance, as Watkins puts it, of ‘the difference between “then” and “now.”’ <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">But Watkins also criticizes <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s no-future claim as making little <i>sociological </i>sense: the ‘Great Look Forward,’ she writes, ‘was not a matter of messianic belief but a rational response to the experience of accelerating social and economic change.’ An <i>interpretation</i>of accelerating social and economic change, in other words. And, like all interpretations, as <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> puts it ‘heavy and ordinary and present-centred.’ <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s effort is merely to point this out. And to show that the very act of looking forward ‘greatly,’ just like we have said of the act of analysing ‘deeply,’ has become the bedrock of modern life and, therefore, the very thing to be resisted if modern life is to be challenged in any way. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">But Watkins does not agree with this version of modern life; for, her strongest criticism of Clark’s no-future claim is that it makes little <i>ideological </i>sense – the claim, she says, ‘would already appear to be established as the postmodern order of the day: a changeless now, from horizon to horizon, and a presentist politics reduced to the mindless repetition of the words, “Yes, we can.”’ In other words, Watkins’ view is that it is Clark’s no-futurism that is ‘heavy and ordinary and present-centred,’ <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s no-futurism that is the bedrock of modern life and, therefore, the very thing to be resisted if modern life is to be challenged in any way. (It is worth pointing out that Watkins’ view of modern life here – as dominated by presentism – sits uneasily with her earlier claim that ‘no uniform ethos, habitus or particular way of being human is discernible across [its] varied landscape.’)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Here, then, is the central question, rather baldly put: Is modern life, as <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> says it is, dominated by futurism and therefore in need of more presentism? Or is modern life, as Watkins says it is, dominated by presentism, and therefore at the very least not in need of relinquishing its futurism? To some extent, the answer is: both! But only insofar as the apparent ‘presentism’ of modern life is ultimately in thrall to a substance-less orientation towards future (<i>and</i> a sentimentalizing nostalgia for the past) that would erase anything like a meaningful engagement with here and now. Clark’s merit is that he sees that this is the case, that the click-of-the-mouse, at-your-fingertips presentism of modern life, which is so ergonomic as to the respond to us more and more at the level of instinct, makes things such that the present is continually effaced, in part by empty anticipations of what is to come. Much of the ergonomics of modern life, after all, goes to facilitate mediation of the present with the future (I’ll record now to watch later), or to bind us into a continual process of almost entirely virtual consumerism, founded upon <i>the time when</i>...I’ll make cupcakes (and this is where sentimentalizing nostalgia for the past plays its part) in my new shabby-chic enamel bun tins, I’ll sip wine from my new ‘Jamie-At-Home’ glasses, I’ll read all of the books I’ve been planning to read, on my new Kindle...And, politically, this is also the structure of modern life: a ‘you can make it happen now’ ergonomics, in which you can (but mostly don’t) design your own healthcare, set up your own school, vote in your own police commissioner; combined with grand visions of One Nation of peace and prosperity. Watkins is betrayed by her own example in this regard: ‘Yes, we can’ is patently <i>not</i> a presentist slogan; it is a call to focus on a future that cannot be, by a man elected as the messiah that never was...<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 18.0pt; line-height: 150%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">So much for the <i>abstract</i>achievement that <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> would ask of us. So much, that is, for <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s claim that we have no future. It can, I think, survive Watkins’ criticisms, although to do so it must rely upon a philosophical tradition that would emphasize history and contingency, language and finitude, and upon vivid descriptions of modern life, which would persuade us as forcefully as possible to recognize ourselves and the times we live in. But what, now, of the <i>applied</i>achievement that <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> would ask of us? What of his exhortation that we begin to think and act as if we have no future? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">It is at this juncture that we must point to the one aspect of <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s abstract claim upon which Clark and Watkins <i>agree</i>: the present, modern life, is without ‘conceptual coherence.’ Clark holds this to be true, because it is his view that finite human understanding is incapable generally of ‘conceptual coherence’; Watkins holds this to be true, because it is her view that the present must lose its open-endedness, must become the past in short, before it can properly be subject to ‘rational analysis.’ But how Clark and Watkins <i>respond</i> to this shared view of modern life – how they <i>apply</i> this abstract acknowledgment – is very different, and crucially so. Watkins holds, as many academics and theoreticians hold: that <i>we</i><i>humans must do as we humans are</i>; that <i>substance </i>and <i>style</i> must accord; that it is possible and right to reflect the abstract acknowledgment – that modern life may now have, and may turn out to have had, a character very different from the one we now think of it as having – in what we say and do. <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> holds the contrary view: that <i>we humans must not do as we humans are</i>; that there is no way to give practical expression to the abstract admission of the partial, <i>incoherent</i>, nature of our understanding of modern life. ‘No doubt,’ writes <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 36.0pt;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">there is an alternative to the present order of things. Yet nothing follows from this – nothing deserving the name political. Left politics is immobilized at the level of theory and therefore of practice, by the idea that it should spend its time turning over the entrails of the present for signs of catastrophe and salvation.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Nothing follows, Clark argues, from the abstract admission that we cannot be sure of the present; the effort to make something follow, as Watkins would, gives rise to a nihilistic emptying out of thought and action, all under the guise of a great and irresistible <i>reasonableness</i>, ‘a need for deeper inquiry,’ a demand for ‘conceptual coherence.’ Nothing follows, then, from the intellectual acknowledgment that our understanding of the present is but an <i>interpretation</i> of the present; nothing, but an immobilization of thought and of action; nothing, but an engine idling, endlessly and to no good effect. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">We might say, then, that Watkins’ weakness, her inability to think of modern life, is the result of her <i>fear of modern life</i>, her fear of its ‘incoherence,’ which makes her determine to make no claim about modern life except the claim that modern life is too ‘varied’ a ‘landscape’ to make any claim about. Watkins, for this reason, is immobilized at the level of application; the only information she can act upon is ‘coherent’ information, and the only ‘coherent’ information about modern life is that there is no ‘coherence’ to be had from modern life. And, in this respect, she is like many modern-day intellectuals, particularly academic intellectuals – Chantal Mouffe, for example, recently published an article entitled ‘Truth is Concrete,’&nbsp;in which she too concluded that nothing can be concluded from the ‘varied landscape’ of modern life, and also on the grounds that we finite humans <i>must do</i> as we finite humans <i>are</i>, in other words, that we must reflect our abstract acknowledgement of the partiality of our understanding of modern life when it comes to applying ourselves to the thinking and acting of modern life. ‘I strongly believe,’ says Mouffe, ‘that...it is necessary to adopt a pluralistic perspective.’ Why? Because, as Mouffe puts it, ‘things could always have been otherwise and every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities.’ The task, then, as Mouffe sees it, is to find ways to ‘disarticulate’ any interpretation of the current order of things so as to leave room for other interpretations.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">But the problem, with Mouffe and with Watkins, is this: our ordinary experience nowadays <i>is pluralistic to its core</i>, and therefore not to be challenged in any way by what is now a general ‘intellectual’ enthusiasm for ‘a pluralistic perspective.’ Mouffe addresses her argument to the Italian radicals we have already mentioned here, and one among them, Paolo Virno, argues that it is precisely a <i>pluralistic perspective</i> that constitutes modern life. In ‘The Ambivalence of Disenchantment,’ he writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 36.0pt;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">A process of uprooting without end, engendered by the mutability of contexts marked for the most part by conventions, artifices, and abstractions, overturns this scheme [the scheme of ‘disarticulation, à la Mouffe] and submits it to an inexorable practical critique...Today’s modes of being and feeling lie in an <i>abandonment without reserve to our own finitude</i>. Uprooting...constitutes the substance of our contingency and precariousness...It constitutes an ordinary condition that everyone feels because of the continual mutation of modes of production, techniques of communication, and styles of life.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><st1:place w:st="on"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Clark</span></st1:place><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">’s claim – the claim that we have no future – can best be summarized as: we humans are <i>finite</i>. But this abstract claim cannot, not now, be <i>applied</i>, because, as Virno expresses it, <i>an</i> <i>abandonment without reserve to our finitude </i>is the defining feature of our times, which we might describe as demanding a we-finite-humans-<i>must-do</i>-as-we-finite-humans-<i>are</i> mode of living. Adopting a ‘pluralistic perspective,’ as Mouffe and Watkins would have us do, is grist to the mill of modern life. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">David Harvey, in a recent history of neo-liberalism, expresses regret at what he regards as the so-far ineffectual opposition to neo-liberal hegemony, and names as culpable ‘all those postmodern intellectual currents that accord without knowing it, with the White House line that truth is both socially constructed and a mere effect of discourse.’ His recommendation is that we drown out this pluralistic intellectualism with the acknowledgement, as he puts it, that ‘there is a reality out there and it is catching up with us fast.’&nbsp;Because the ‘concrete’ truth is that things could <i>not</i> ‘always have been otherwise,’ as Mouffe thinks. Or at least, nothing follows from the fact that they could. Nothing, but those endless efforts to <i>theorize multplicity</i> and <i>think plurality</i> that are clogging our intellectual arteries and contributing to the apparently unstoppable ‘progress’ of modern life. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 18.0pt; line-height: 150%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">The material point, then, is this: Watkins’ refusal to <i>respond</i> to modern life in any manner other than by an intellectual idling in its ‘varied landscape’ is <i>precisely the form of control that defines our times</i>. Modern life, we might say, thrives upon a <i>general intellectualism</i>. What form, then, does this intellectualism take? What, in other words, are the features of modern-day control? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">At his trial, Socrates is reported to have described to the men of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Athens</st1:city></st1:place> a day in the life he has lived, a life which they are gathered there to determine the guilt or innocence of. ‘All day long,’ spoke Socrates, ‘I never cease to settle here, there, and everywhere, rousing, persuading, reproving every one of you. You will not easily find another like me, gentlemen...’&nbsp;Socrates lived his life in the marketplace, questioning those who were going about their business, showing up the inadequacy of their merely human, finite, conceptions of truth and of right; the philosopher of ‘things could always have been otherwise.’ And, in Socrates’ time, it is easy to believe that such a role was vital; in a small city, with deeply entrenched prejudices, much like a stubborn, one-directional horse, the <i>gadfly philosopher</i> was badly needed. But times have changed, and <i>we are all gadflies now</i>, abandoned without reserve to our finitude, never settling for long enough to coalesce into anything like as stable as a horse. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Franco ‘Bifo’ Berradi spoke recently in interview of the many protests that have been launched against the conditions of late-capitalism – the sit-ins, the occupations, the street marches. Berradi explains that what he regards as their ineffectuality is the result of a disjunction, between the physicality of the protests and the virtuality of what is being protested against; the streets, in his view, are no longer the appropriate domain for active resistance to modern life.&nbsp;But we might equally say, that <i>the marketplace</i> is no longer the appropriate arena for active effectual thinking of modern life. Why? <i>Because nothing’s going on in the marketplace</i>: no jobs, or if there are jobs, they are the most passing, precarious things of all; no identifications, of if there are identifications, they are the most ephemeral because consumer-driven; no ideas, or if there are ideas, they are held at arms length, to allow for ‘a pluralistic perspective’; no poets except those who are ‘post-literary’; no craftsmen save for systems-operators; no politicians who are not cyphers for global institutions of capitalism; no horses but those constituted by the most momentary and most virtual formations of gadflies. Virno describes very well the cynicism and opportunism of late-capitalist societies, in which we believe in nothing and attach ourselves to anything, in which we belong to nothing but hang our sense of self on anything.<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Lars.LARSLAPTOP/Desktop/Sinead's%20Documents/Conference%20Papers%204/The%20Thinking%20of%20Modern%20Life.doc#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-size: 12pt;">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><i>All day long, we never cease to settle, here, there, and everywhere, rousing, persuading, reproving. You will easily find millions of others like us...</i>The challenge, then, is how to address gadflies? Solve this, and we will have learnt what it is, the thinking of modern life.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">In her article, Watkins addresses, one by one, all of the texts that <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>, in his article, lines up in support of his argument. But, of the very first one – Bruegel’s <i>The Land of Cockaigne</i> – she writes: ‘<st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> offers a compelling interpretation of the painting...But...might it not equally be read as...’ To which, on the one hand, the only reply is: ‘Yes! Of course Bruegel’s painting might equally be read as..., just as the origins of the First World War might equally be identified as...’ But, <i>what follows</i> from this, quintessentially ‘intellectual,’ acknowledgment that all readings of texts are interpretations of texts, just like all accounts of modern life are interpretations of modern life? As <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> says, <i>nothing</i> <i>follows</i>. Not now. For, we live now in a world of opportunism and cynicism, a world in which we are all too aware that <i>it might equally be read as</i>, that <i>things could always have been otherwise</i>. What we require to be persuaded of is that anything might be read with conviction, that anything might only be what it is. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 18.0pt; line-height: 150%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Watkins’ <i>interpretationism</i>, amounts to the demand that, in giving an account of modern life, we do as Mouffe would have us do, that is, ‘recognize not a flat homogenous present but a range of uneven temporalities at work within the same chronological time...Such a world,’ Watkins says, ‘requires a perspective that is internationalist, but also irreducibly pluralistic: not one tonality, but many.’ In this regard, Watkins urges us to adopt a <i>comic perspective</i>, to admit, as Aristotle did, <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 36.0pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 36.0pt;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">the place of comedy alongside tragedy, with its contrary values: multiplicity as well as tragic unity; coupling and procreation as well as death; what his <i>Poetics</i> called ‘the inferior people,’ always so numerous, and the mockery of rulers, in place of pity and awe. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">But what Watkins fails to see is that <i>comic inferiority</i> is now the form of our tragedy, that <i>mockery of rulers</i> is now the mode of our tragic subjection, and that <i>procreation</i>(we are now seven billion!) is now the principle reason for our imminent demise. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">If we do as I have suggested, and translate Clark’s call for a ‘tragic perspective’ into the call for a ‘historical perspective,’ then the <i>necessity</i> against which human freedom tragically crashes again and again is revealed to be, not some unitary force – God, Nature, Fate – but <i>pell-mell</i>, chaos, contingency, the war of good with good. Human plans and purposes collide time and again against the force of history, which is undermining of human plans and purposes not in its brick-wall stasis but in its unpredictable fluidity, its constantly unfolding contingency. History <i>already installs the principle of multiplicity</i>, <i>already installs the pluralistic perspective</i>, at the very heart of human endeavour; we are <i>tragic</i>, then, because we are <i>comic</i>: disordered, chaotic, ‘incoherent,’ ‘irrational.’<i> </i>When we conceived of our tragedy differently, when we posited some unitary force or forces, as operative upon human effort, then it was likely very necessary to interpose with testimony to the multiple, the pluralistic character of so-called unitary forces. But we no longer posit such unitary forces, for modern life is abandoned without reserve to the finitude of everything and we must therefore interpose with testimony to something other than multiplicity, something other than plurality, some perspective other than the comic one. We must be horse-philosophers not gadfly-philosophers, contrary and all as that now appears to be to what we have come to think of thinking as. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">And it is important to point out that, if Watkins does not see this at all, then <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> only sees it in part. For, <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s version of thinking-as-‘moderacy’ is still &nbsp;too comic to be the tragic perspective he is looking for. Watkins identifies the following passage, quoted by Clark from Nietzsche’s <i>The Will To Power</i>, as the most significant passage in the whole of <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s article: <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 36.0pt;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this? The most moderate; those who do not <i>require</i> any extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede but actually love a fair amount of contingency and nonsense; those who can think of man with a considerable reduction of his value without becoming small and weak themselves on that account...<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">The problem with <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> is that he regards <i>utopianism</i>, the infantilizing deferral to an ideal future, as the aspect of modern life that requires most to be overcome. ‘Extremism,’ he says, ‘is the ticket to ride of our times.’ This is true. But so too is <i>moderacy</i>the ticket to ride of our times, if, by moderacy, we mean, as <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>does, the love of ‘a fair amount of contingency and nonsense.’ What Clark misses, and his missing it seriously hampers his efforts to think of modern life, is that infantilizing promises of escape from mortal existence are nowadays combined with ‘intellectualiizing’ feelings of love for mortal existence, in the ‘abandonment without reserve’ to mortal existence that Virno describes. Which is why modern life is so difficult to resist, combining as it does, a sense of belonging to the most fleetingly posited of ideals with a total cynicism about the extent to which anything has lasting merit; an opportunistic focus upon the most passing and finite of chances with a low-level but persistent anxious nostalgia for what might yet have been...<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 18.0pt; line-height: 150%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">If, traditionally, the task of thinking was the task of operating about the <i>margins</i> of life, <i>never ceasing, all day long, to settle here, there, and everywhere</i>, then never ceasing, all day long, to settle here, there, and everywhere is now the most basic aspect of our condition, which is therefore <i>not</i> <i>to be roused</i> by the marginal styles. As a <i>marginal</i> concern, <i>utopianism</i>, for example, may indeed have been effective, operating in trickle-down fashion, to edify us with a vision of something better. And, as a <i>marginal</i> concern, <i>interpretationism </i>too might have been effective, operating in trickle-down fashion, to edify us with a sense that things might, at the very least, be otherwise. But, by now, utopianism and interpretationism <i>have trickled down</i>, and not in substance but in <i>style</i>, so that a contentless and infantilizing futurism and an it-might-always-have-been-otherwise, relativistic opportunism are the main constituents of modern life. For this reason, the fact that utopianism furnishes us with visions that are ‘heavy and ordinary and present-centred,’ just as interpretationism provides us with analyses that are ‘heavy and ordinary and present-centred,’ is the least of their problems. In societies in which they were <i>marginal</i> to strong and commonly-held prejudices, utopianism and interpretationism may still have had their effects; the engine may have idled, and somewhat lopsidedly, but it may still have been in better working order when it set off again. In our society, however, utopianism and interpretationism are marginal to nothing, and so the engine just keeps on idling; utopianism and interpretationism are adopted as styles of living, the ‘heavy and ordinary and present-centred’ content of any particular utopia or any particular interpretation being negligible by comparison with the style of thinking, the mode of living, it reinforces. This is why, as Clark puts it, <i>nothing follows</i> now from utopian visions and ‘rational’ interpretations: as, in our late-capitalist societies, there is no trickle-down of wealth, just of the speculation and consumption practices that generate it; so, in our late-capitalist societies, there is no trickle-down of ideas, just of the futurist and relativist thinking practices that generate them. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">We must, then, say of Watkins and, partly, of <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>, as Watkins reports Lukács as saying of Nietzsche. ‘In his penetrating characterization,’ Watkins writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 36.0pt;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Lukács suggested that Nietzsche’s greatest gift was his ‘anticipatory sensitivity’ for what the disaffected intelligentsia of the imperial era would require; his dazzling aphorisms and wide cultural range would ‘satisfy its frustrated, sometimes rebellious instincts with gestures that appeared fascinating and hyper-revolutionary.’ The social function of Nietzsche’s writing was to rescue dissatisfied intellectuals who might be drawn to the alternative of the workers’ movement; on the basis of his philosophy, ‘one could go on as before – with fewer inhibitions and a clearer conscience – and feel oneself to be much more revolutionary than the socialists.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Reading Watkins-style <i>analyses</i>, just as <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> observes of encounters with left-thinking visions of the future, has now the effect that Lukács describes, of allowing us to ‘go on as before.’ Only now, it is worse, for the dominant styles of thinking now satisfy not just would-be revolutionary intellectuals but <i>everyone</i>. For, there is a <i>general intellectualism</i> about modern life, <i>a general high-mindedness and a general open-mindedness</i>, a <i>general mode of thinking</i> that is, like the markets that are the gods of our time, utterly insubstantial but fascinatingly self-perpetuating. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">The closing sentence of the opening section of Watkins’ article reads as follows: ‘This is a preliminary and personal reply; no doubt there will be many others.’ As preparation for what is to follow, it is unsurpassable, revealing of just that tripartite displacement of the present, which is the character of modern life and against which <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s article would argue. For, if we examine this simple sentence, we find it to contain all of the most important features of Watkins’ way of thinking, which: excuses itself on the grounds of a <i>future</i>that will provide something better; presents itself as no more than a <i>personal </i>reaction; and opens itself to the potential challenge of <i>others</i>. <i>The</i> <i>future, the personal, </i>and <i>others</i>: the three orientations whereby thinking in modern life removes the possibility of thinking of modern life. As the French group, Tiqqun, expresses it: ‘The commodity society now seeks to find its best supports in the marginalized elements of traditional society themselves – women and youths first, then homosexuals and “minorities.”’&nbsp;(See <i>Raw Materials for a Theory of The Young Girl</i>)&nbsp;We might say that the marginals – women, children and ‘minorities’ – are now ‘in,’ via the infantilizing futurism, feminizing emotivism, ‘other’-orientedness of modern life. Which means, of course, that the margins cannot any longer give us a perspective on modern life, that Watkins’ ‘pluralistic perspective’ cannot <i>think</i>of modern life. Theorizing plurality, thinking multiplicity, as our academics are now so wont to do, is utter nihilism. It is the intellectualization of nihilism. These are the days ‘when nihilism speaks of happiness,’ says Tiqqun. These are the days when nihilism speaks of <i>reason.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 18.0pt; line-height: 150%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">What, then, <i>is</i> it, to think of modern life?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">The answer lies in Virno’s phrase, the one that describes the defining mode of modern life as ‘abandonment without reserve to our own finitude.’ The phrase implies two modes of resistance to modern life. The first is a downright denial of our finitude. But that will not do; <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s emphasis on the ordinary and heavy and present-centred nature of our reflections is the most recent in too long and convincing a philosophical criticism of Enlightenment hopes that reason and progress might be supported by some more-than-finite grounds. &nbsp;‘We are always affected, whether in hope or fear, by what is nearest to us...’<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">But the other possibility for resistance held out by Virno’s phrases is that we admit, but <i>with reserve</i>, our finitude, that we <i>reserve something from </i>our finitude. I believe that this is what it is, to think of modern life. What, then, does it involve?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">To answer this question, it will help to return, one last time, to a brief account of what it is to abandon ourselves <i>without reserve</i> to our finitude. The primary object of <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s criticism is, as we have said, the <i>utopianism</i> that he believes to define the intellectual left in our time. But there are, as we have also said, two tricks that Clark misses here: one, is that the characteristics that Clark attributes to the intellectual left in our time are actually much more widely attributable to the nature of our time more generally; the other, is that, not only utopianism but interpretationism too, not only extremism but moderacy too, not only messianic faith but rational analysis too, have trickled down from their intellectual heights to constitute the dominant mode of experience in modern life, the ‘ticket to ride’ of our times. And it is this heady combination – of a specious utopianism (someday, <i>surely...</i>) and an empty interpretationism (that may be true for you, but...) – that makes for our abandonment without reserve to our finitude. We no longer recognize claims that purport to apply to anything or anyone other than this moment and me (design your own...; a package for <i>now</i>), unless those claims call forth a vision whose total unrelatedness to current conditions is in proportion to its total satisfaction of our need to belong to something greater than ourselves. Our buildings – so futuristic, with their steel and their glass; so plumb and so square – go up as instantaneously as they are designed to be pulled down. A year sometimes is beyond their endurance, their materials as deteriorated by tiny passages of time as they were suggestive, on first encounter, of an unimaginably future time; the future in every angle; the finite in every pore. Our clothes – make yourself over in a matter of seconds and very cheaply, in a the-future-is-now simple move; and have every unfinished seam, every degrading elastine component, every thinnest-weave cotton length, degrade at first contact with human form and movement. Everywhere we go now, everything we eat, sit on, wear and use, makes an onslaught of this pincer movement to an oh-so-infinite future and an oh-so-finite now. We are abandoned without reserve to our finitude, when we content ourselves with the most merely-human of satisfactions and the most utterly-inhuman of dreams. &nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">And our theories are like our houses and our clothes. ‘This is a preliminary and personal reply; no doubt there will be many others,’ writes Watkins, invoking, in one short introductory line, both the limitedness of merely human effort – so ‘personal,’ so ‘preliminary’ – and the ilimitedness of much-more-than-human validity – ‘preliminary’ and ‘many others’ would fold into this reply the truth of all possible replies. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">What, then, would it be like to admit our finitude but <i>with reserve</i>? We humans can never be anything other than finite, never anything other than ordinary and heavy and present-centred. Our perspective can never be other than historical, or, as <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> would have it, tragic. So much, we admit. But we abandon ourselves to this admission when we allow it to prevent us from forming any opinion but the most vague, taking any action but the most omnilateral, thinking anything but the most abstract, adopting any perspective but the most pluralistic. Our situation is ordinary and heavy and present-centred, true, but <i>we must act as if it is ours, we must stand up and claim it as our own</i>, if we are not to be left with no situation at all. This is why the historical perspective, as we have called it here, is not the same in the applied admission as it is in the abstract admission: our abstract admission is <i>un</i>reserved – we are irreducibly finite beings; but our applied admission is reserved – yes, we are finite beings but we have reasons so good for what we see, what we think, and what we do, that we are willing to exclude other possibilities for seeing, thinking and doing in their defence. We act as if we are finite, not by abandoning ourselves to our finitude but by raising ourselves above it, not just by admitting our finitude but by denying it too. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">But wait a moment. Is not this dual movement of admission and denial not just another version of what we have described Watkins’ approach as amounting to, that is, a combination of admitting the utterly finite nature of things while positing an infinite future? It is not. For, there is a vast difference, between the institutionalized, systematized, emptied-out admission/denial of Watkins-style thinking; and the rich, variable, and productive admission/denial of what I am recommending as the thinking of modern life. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">In a short essay entitled ‘The Experience of Death,’ Gadamer reflects on what he describes as ‘the gradual disappearance of the representation of death in modern society.’&nbsp;The funeral procession, once a common sight on the streets of our towns and cities, is all but gone; the expectation that family members will die in their homes or ours more or less unknown; the widespread use of morphine preventing us even from the experience of our own death. But what has disappeared is not straightforward, Gadamer warns. For, though, as he says, there are historical records to indicate that death-rituals are older even than language itself, what these records also show is that death-rituals, throughout history, share a common refusal to acknowledge death as the end, a common reference to some form of afterlife for the deceased. What has disappeared, then, is not a simple admission of human finitude, but a richly and variously ritualised admission in the form of denial, and denial in the form of admission. What we have today, says Gadamer, is also admission of human finitude (secular societies have relinquished hopes of the religious beyond) and denial of human finitude (secular societies outsource their confrontation to institutions and pharmaceuticals), but our admission and denial is brought to such ‘institutional perfection,’ as Gadamer describes it,&nbsp;is so systematic, so sterile, so emptied-out of content, that it amounts to what Virno calls the abandonment without reserve to our finitude, combining a total relinquishment of the rich mythologies of finitude with an infantile trust in institutions and practices so vast and impersonal that they are taken to have a merit much more than anything merely human. ‘As regards our enlightened cultural world,’ writes Gadamer, ‘it is not inappropriate to speak of an almost systematic repression of death,’ which is to say, an almost systematic, utterly unreserved, abandonment to it. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">What we require, then, is a way of thinking that is not systematic in its admission/denial of our finitude, not sterile, not emptied-out, but that is rich, ritualised, productive and fulsome in its admission/denial of our finitude. The sterile futurism of our glass and steel cities has its reprimand still in the crumbling eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings it is gradually replacing, with their modest-but-immodest ‘Clark and Bros.’ or such like, sculpted into the stone lintel above the door. What is this, but an admission, <i>with reserve</i>, of human finitude, not refusing to nail one’s colours to the mast in the knowledge that one’s colours will inevitably fade, but acting in defiance of this fading and, by doing so, mastering it to some degree. We must learn to think as the Victorians learned to build, etching our thoughts and actions in stone and wagering they’ll outwit our finite existences. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 18.0pt; line-height: 150%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><st1:place w:st="on"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Clark</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> makes this wager, I think, venturing forth, as we have seen him do, with his interpretation of modern life, giving this interpretation all the content he can muster, concluding something from the varied landscape of modern life, identifying an ethos, forming and recording his <i>impressions</i>. Watkins criticizes Clark’s article for its use of asyndeton, ‘lists in which (for example) Franco, Pol Pot, Ayman al-Zawahiri are made to march in step, without so much as a conjunction between them; making one wonder whether Clark thinks that historical causality has any role to play.’ But Clark does not think that historical causality has any role to play, or rather, Clark thinks that historical causality is so complex, so ‘pell-mell,’ that the very most we can form are <i>impressions</i> of how it might be at work. Watkins also mentions <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s reliance on the present continuous tense – ‘We are seeing...’ But, what tense is a better one for the thinker of modern life? ‘The reader here may sometimes feel coerced as much as persuaded,’ continues Watkins. Is <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> to be criticised, then, because his impressions of modern life are so vivid, and so current, as to compel us to see what he sees? Not so; for, this is what it is like, to etch ‘<st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> and Bros.’ in the stone over the door. It inspires trust. Here is a business that intends to stay. Here is an enterprise of substance. You need go no further than here...<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The forming and describing of <i>impressions of modern life</i> is, then, one very effective way to think of modern life. Tiqqun, who compiled ‘materials for a theory’ and never gave them ‘coherence’ but sent them forth broad-blown and flush as May, explain this very well:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 36.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Except incorrectly speaking – which may be our intention – the jumble of fragments that follows in no way comprise a theory. They are materials accumulated randomly in encounters with, visits with, and observation of YoungGirls; pearls extracted from their newspapers and magazines; expressions gleaned in sometimes dubious circumstances, arranged in no particular order. They are gathered here under approximate headings...a bit of order had to be given to them. The decision to put them out like this, in all their incompleteness, their contingent origins, with all the ordinary excess of elements that would have comprised a nicely presentable theory if they were polished, cleaned out, and whittled down, means choosing <i>trash theory</i> for once. The cardinal ruse of theoreticians in general is that they present the result of their elaborations in such a way as to make the <i>elaboration process itself no longer appear in them. </i>In our estimation, this ruse doesn’t work any more in the face of today’s...attention span fragmentation. We’ve chosen a different one. Minds looking for moral comfort or for vice to condemn will find in these scattered pages but roads that will lead them nowhere. In fact we’re not so much trying to convert YoungGirls as we are trying to trace out all the corners of a fractalized batttlefront of YoungGirlization. And to supply the weapons for a hand to hand, blow by blow fight, wherever you may find yourself.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 18.0pt; line-height: 150%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">There is, however, another option than interpretation-as-impressionism, when it comes to the thinking of modern life. And it is, <i>utopianism</i>, but with a level of content and conviction to trump the infantilization and inertia that <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place> describes so well in respect of the left. We might say, only <i>dangerous utopianism</i> will now do, taking something from Zizek’s most recent publication, which concedes something to <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s argument but then asks whether we cannot still <i>have more</i>.&nbsp;(See <i>The Year of Dreaming Dangerously</i>)&nbsp;Zizek’s answer is that we can, so long as we are willing and able to expand our thinking into the realm of <i>believing</i>. It is a dangerous game, of course, but it certainly affords us finite humans the chance of reserving something from our finitude. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The problem with <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>, according to Žižek, is that his understanding of ‘future’ is truncated, limited to the-future-that-comes-from-what-is-now (<i>our </i>future, we might say) and closed to that other sense of ‘future,’ the-future-that-is-to-come<i>, </i>unpredictably and miraculously (<i>a </i>future<i>, </i>we might say). <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>is right to claim that <i>we</i> have no future, Žižek accepts; <i>our</i> future, after all, is almost entirely veiled against our capacities to anticipate it. But there is still <i>a </i>future before us, Žižek insists, <i>a </i>future that does not merely follow from what is now but that comes from nowhere, as a bolt comes from the heavens, marking a shift in the course of things of a kind that, by definition, we can only imagine. Naturally, positing <i>a </i>future requires faith, Žižek admits. But not blind faith. Not an infantilizing faith. And certainly not an inert faith. For, positing <i>a </i>future requires of us that we begin, actively, to interpret events around us, aspects of modern life, as signs of <i>a </i>future, much as Kant, to whom Žižek refers, interpreted the enthusiasm of those onlookers to the French Revolution as a sign of <i>a </i>future as progress and enlightenment.&nbsp;By so interpreting modern life as offering signs of <i>a </i>future, we will go to constitute <i>a</i> future, such that, though we may not have <i>our</i> future (finite beings that we are), we can have <i>a </i>future if we believe in it and perform our belief. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">At the end of the eighteenth-century, Kant urged us all <i>to act as if</i>. His argument was that, though we (finite) humans can never <i>know</i> that there is a grand purpose to human existence, we can and must <i>act as if </i>there is, in order for progress to ensue, making the most of those occasions (for Kant, experiences of the beautiful and the sublime) on which it really <i>feels as if</i> there is a great purpose to human existence. For, the wonderful thing is that if we <i>act as if</i> there is a great purpose to human existence, progress <i>will</i> ensue! Therein lies the force of the experiment: we can reserve something from our finitude by believing in something greater than it; we can transform our finite perspective by actively imagining beyond it. It is a risky business, of course. Progress, as Kant conceived of it (the advance of scientistic thinking and acting), though it ensued from the experiment he persuaded us to, did not turn out very well, arguably having given rise to the problems – of social, political, economic and environmental collapse – that are defining of modern life. But, it is worth another try, Žižek at least would convince us. And <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>, I think, would agree, with the single proviso that we make sure <i>to act as if </i>our imagined future <i>already is</i>, and not merely as if it <i>will be</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 18.0pt; line-height: 150%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Modern life issues the following imperative: put meat on the bones of our interpretations and our utopias, so that we may resurrect the skeleton that has been made by now of thought and of action. No doubt, this will seem barbarism, irrational and incoherent, to our stripped-down secular way of thinking, but rationalism and coherence have met their limit in the historical nature of human existence, which can be admitted, fully, truly, only with some degree of denial, only with some amount of reserve. Gadamer accepts that this would seem to leave ‘thinking little space for its work of conceptual questioning, grounding and justifying,’&nbsp;but it is our task, in modern life, to make much of this little space, to make a kingdom indeed of this nutshell, for it is the extent of our domain. &nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 18.0pt; line-height: 150%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">There is, however, one more feature of the thinking of modern life, one more way in which we must put meat back on the bones of thought and action, one more way in which we must reserve something from our finitude: the reinstatement of the <i>literal</i>. ‘I was <i>literally</i> blown away by what she said,’ is a version of what is so common a turn of phrase nowadays, ‘literally’ now most usually employed to introduce what is, in fact, a figure of speech! It is as if the departure from the literal to the figurative is no longer expressive enough, as if the literal must be reinvoked, but <i>figuratively</i>, for appropriate emphasis. And the upshot is nothing less than modern life’s gradual relinquishment of the very notion of reality. Just as interpretations have trickled down as style but not substance, and utopias have trickled down as style but not substance, so reality too is trickling down as style but not substance: the literal as figure; reality as turn of phrase. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">In <i>The Order of Things</i>, Foucault tells of the transformation that took place, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from a world formed by the paradigm of ‘resemblance’ to a world formed by the paradigm of ‘representation.’&nbsp;It is another in Foucault’s line of attempts to awaken in us a sense of the historical, the tragic if you will, nature of reality and of truth, which, in a world formed by the paradigm of ‘representation,’ have been taken to be the very opposite of historical: reality is that against which we have long understood the historical to stand forth (in all its <i>merely</i> finite humanness); and truth is that which we have defined as the accurate <i>representation </i>of reality. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">But it was not always thus, Foucault would have us accept. In an age previous to ours, the truth or otherwise of words was not dependent upon the extent to which words represented things. On the contrary, <i>words were things</i>; that is, words enjoyed a kind of reality that <i>we</i>attribute only to things. Far from merely representing real things, words too were real. Foucault writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 36.0pt;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">In the sixteenth century, real language is not a totality of independent signs, a uniform and unbroken entity in which things could be reflected one by one, as in a mirror, and so express their particular truths. It is rather an opaque and mysterious thing, closed in upon itself, a fragmented mass, its enigma renewed in every interval, which combines here and there with the forms of the world and becomes interwoven with them: so much so that all these elements, taken together, form a network of marks in which each of them may play, and does in fact play, in relation to all the others, the role of content or of sign, that of secret or of indicator. In its raw, historical sixteenth-century being, language is not an arbitrary system; it has been set down in the world and forms a part of it, both because things themselves hide and manifest their own enigma like a language and because words offer themselves to men as things to be deciphered. The great metaphor of the book that one opens, that one pores over and reads in order to know nature, is merely the reverse and visible side of another transference, and a much deeper one, which forces language to reside in the world, among the plants, the herbs, the stones, and the animals.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">The binary opposition of words and things is, then, a modern invention, as Foucault tells it; in a previous time, things were like words, insofar as they were signs to be interpreted on the basis of various modes of resemblance between them and other signs, and words were like things, insofar as they had properties unto themselves and not only by virtue of their referential function. Words and things were, in effect, the same kind of thing! During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, this ‘profound kinship of language with the world was dissolved.’&nbsp;Henceforth, words said things, that is, words referred to things and were nothing more than this referral. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">But modern life is emerging from the cusp of another epochal divide, as great indeed as that which Foucault describes as having taken place during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a divide between The Age of Representation, and an age in which the binary structure of word-and-things is giving way to a unitary structure of words-and-more-words. This is The Age of <i>Public</i> Representation: in which words are all-in-all, concern with their accurate or otherwise representation of things increasingly anachronistic; in which that link between words and things, which had appeared to us unbreakable, is broken; in which the gold-standard notions of ‘reality’ and ‘realistic,’ have been dissolved. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Foucault describes the mode of being of language in The Age of Resemblance as simultaneously ‘plethoric’ and ‘poverty-stricken’: ‘plethoric,’ because, without The Age of Representation’s <i>real world</i> to put a stay upon potential for meaning, meaning is infinite, generated laterally, as it were, between words and words, and words and things, and things and things, without any word or thing being capable, for more than an instant, of operating as the guarantee or foundation of meaning; and ‘poverty-stricken’ for precisely the same reason, precisely because no word or thing can operate for more than an instant as the fountain of a wisdom that is any deeper than the next formulation of words or arrangement of things. And plethoric and poverty-stricken is our condition too, in our Age of Public Representation, in which there has been an explosive increase in communications proportionate to a dramatic decrease in the likelihood of their producing any <i>real</i> effect. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">But, there is a crucial distinction between the mode of being of words in The Age of Resemblance and the mode of being of words in The Age of Public Representation. Foucault describes the binary relation of words and things in The Age of Representation as having gradually replaced a <i>ternary</i> relation between word/things and thing/words in The Age of Resemblance, in which the meaningfulness of any relation always required to be <i>grounded</i>, not, as in the Age of Representation, by a realm of things to which an unassailable privilege was granted, but by a third element, which would, though only momentarily and eminently assailably, guarantee some stability to the relation. The structure for such <i>grounding</i>was, as Foucault tells it, given by belief, in the Word of God, or of Nature, which operated to install the (albeit ideal) principle of limitedness at the heart of the otherwise endless proliferations of meaning that characterized the age. We might say that The Age of Representation secularized that limit, positing a real world of things as the unchanging grounding principle, and altering the ternary relation to a binary one. But our age, The Age of Public Representation, has relinquished even the secular limit, thus returning us to The Age of Resemblance but without the principle of limitedness that gave to that age its depth. Hence, the unitary, flattened-out character of meaning in modern life, which grows, like the capitalism with which it is inextricably bound, ‘with no point of departure, no end, and no promise.’<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 18.0pt; line-height: 150%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Paolo Virno describes the conventional mode of living and working (I would add: and of thinking) of modern life, as <i>virtuosic</i>.&nbsp;For Virno, the lack of an end to which our activity is oriented, together with the quintessentially public nature of work and of life (and of thought), means that we are all now in the mode of performers, active but non-productive, communicative because non-productive, active insofar as we are communicative. In other words, since we no longer typically make the things we use (clothes, for example), and since we no longer typically do very many of the things we talk about (eat family meals, for example), all we have are our communications about the making of things and the doing of things. To those still in the mode of <i>things</i> (those yet to have<i> gone public</i>), these communications appear as substitutes and therefore as painful to witness; to such people, communications about things can never substitute for the things themselves. But, to those who have <i>gone public</i>, these communications are glorious, and necessary. Without them, there would be nothing. They are the stuff of our times, not merely substitutes for the (lack of) stuff of our times. Which makes those of us who are <i>of</i> modern life into <i>virtuousi</i>, whose activity amounts to the occasioning of the witnessing of our activity...<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">And Watkins, and Clark too, are not exempt. The one glaring omission from both their reflections on the claim that we have no future is any consideration of the <i>literal</i> meaning of that claim. The evidence is underdetermining, of course, but authorities across the field now tell us, and have been telling us for some time, that the impact of global warming on the near future of our planet is set to be catastrophic; for many of us seven billion, it is literally true that we have no future. But neither Watkins nor Clark confronts this <i>literal </i>prospect. And, in this, they are truly of their time, which seems to talk and talk about ‘climate change’ without generating any sense that it has <i>real</i> implications. In fact, it is the topic of all others to suffer from virtuosity, that is, from the interpretational and utopian <i>styles</i>that have come to define modern life, with any sense of a real problem being utterly buried in a maniacal focus on the <i>multiplicity</i>of opinions on the topic and an infantile trust that it will all be all right in the end. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">What is very interesting in this regard is that Watkins, in her desire to reject the implications of Clark’s tragic perspective, <i>does</i> strike forth from her fundamentally interpretationist style to invoke a <i>literal</i>truth. In the face of <i>Auschwitz</i>, she says, <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>’s view of history as shaped by the war of good with good cannot stand up; for, ‘that would be to impute some good to the perpetrators, some “ethical substance” to their deeds.’ But here we have a real sign of our times, a case of the literal as the greatest figure of all. Certainly, Watkins is not the first to claim for <st1:place w:st="on">Auschwitz</st1:place>the status of ‘literal’ in the midst of proliferating figures.&nbsp;(See, for example, Lyotard's 'The Sign of History')&nbsp;But it will not now do. For <st1:place w:st="on">Auschwitz</st1:place>, with its accompanying mantra of ‘never again,’ has operated by now to efface so many real atrocities, that it is one of the most powerful <i>figures</i> of our time. <st1:place w:st="on">Auschwitz</st1:place> is not <i>our</i> literal. As it is used by Watkins, it is our figure for the literal. Meanwhile, there is a situation building that has long since demanded the kind of respect that only a <i>literal truth</i> can command. ‘There is a reality out there, and it is catching up with us fast...’</span></div><div><div id="ftn21"> </div></div>SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-31135616102051495752013-01-07T05:25:00.001-08:002013-01-07T05:27:21.097-08:00Young Girls Rule The World<a href="http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/web/rp177-shes-just-not-that-into-you">Nina Power's review</a> of <a href="https://younggirl.jottit.com/">Tiqqun's </a><i><a href="https://younggirl.jottit.com/">Raw Materials For A Theory Of The Young Girl</a> </i>misses the point entirely. Not only because, as <a href="http://htmlgiant.com/reviews/a-rebuttal-to-nina-powers-infuriating-review-of-preliminary-materials-for-a-theory-of-the-young-girl/">Seth Oelbaum's rebuttal</a> to Power's 'infuriating review' shows, Power continues to hold to some version of free will as the appropriate response to the combination of growth-capitalism and neo-liberalism that now forms our every experience, but also because Power (and Oelbaum too commits this error) cannot make the move that Tiqqun asks of us: the move to accept that the Young Girl is now a figure for us all. Deep down, or not so deep down, neither Power nor Oelbaum (nor Tiqqun's translator, Ariana Reines, who describes Tiqqun's book as "a book about women") can swallow the fact that the figure of Young Girl can really take the place occupied by the age-old figure of Man (as in, Mankind etc etc).<br /><br />The world used to masculinize; think of the aggressive probing of colonization, or of the industrial age's rape of nature. But the way in which control works in modern, post-productive capitalist societies is by infantilizing and feminizing social, political and cultural life, in short, by young-girlizing social, political and cultural life. Look at <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Radical_Thought_in_Italy.html?id=AQumJdO6AgIC">Paolo Virno's 'The Ambivalence of Disenchantment,'</a> or <a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/74/t-j-clark-for-a-left-with-no-future">T. J. Clark's 'For A Left With No Future'</a>, to find out more. To not be able to accept this point, because of some persistent inability to relinquish the hold of 'Man,' is detrimental to understanding.<br /><br />'The young girl is a cute, sassy, stylish collage that helps the tyrants run the world,' says Oelbaum. <i>Wrong</i>. Tyrants no longer run the world. Young Girls do. SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-36990092290176833682012-12-20T05:21:00.005-08:002012-12-20T05:27:23.166-08:00Have yourself an UNlovely Christmas...The BBC Sports Personality of the Year Awards was a chilling reminder, if we needed it, of the extent to which the London Olympics was, in its aggressive inanity and remember-to-smile ethos<i>, </i>truly, horribly, the event of our times. As if to snare the few remaining sceptics, the programme overran into the 10 o'clock news, by a good 20 minutes, enough time to bear witness to the <i>incredibleness</i>, the <i>unbelievableness</i>, the <i>indescribableness</i> etc. etc. etc, which seem to be preconditions now for even the most basic experience. You're nobody these days unless you're an <i>inspiration</i>. In this sense, the Paralympics were more potent than the Olympics themselves, truly the star of the whole show: the extent to which they devised events to suit athletes, multiplied events to reward athletes, and generated a wash of sentimentalism<i>&nbsp;- we're all different, you know</i> - they made salient the nature of the Games generally, which laundered the misery of economic, political, environmental and cultural collapse, through a massive PR exercise for neoliberalism thinly disguised as a sports competition.<br /><br />After the programme ended, the BBC ran a tribute to <i>us - </i>we had had our representatives in the 'games-makers' who attended the show itself, of course - who had made the games possible and whose spirit of openness and fun, of togetherness and optimism, had been the real winner.<i>&nbsp;</i>With the result that any viewer already incensed by the Olympics, and by the awards programme, and by all the horror-wrapped-in-sweet-papers of our times, was left only with the option of churlish refusal to be optimistic, open, fun, and in-it-together. But if that is the only option left to us, we must take it. The alternative - of acquiescing in saccharine control - is not to be borne.<br /><br />Two weeks ago, The Northern Stage Theatre in Newcastle had a large and illuminated sign hung in their bar (it may still be there). It read: L - O - V - E - L - Y. That's it. Nothing more. The naive question would be: W<i>hat </i>is lovely? 'Lovely' is an adjective, after all. Ah, but not any more it isn't. The mantra of modern life, the category into which experience must fall and to which description must tend, 'Lovely' is, in fact, the imperative of our times, a <i>steel magnolia</i>, so unobjectionable, so enhancing, so adorning, so <i>lovely</i>, but (and you had better believe it) <i>so true</i>.<br /><br />So, whatever you do this Christmas, do not make it a <i>lovely</i>&nbsp;one, will you?SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-6261915861543693822012-12-13T04:42:00.001-08:002012-12-17T04:51:46.169-08:00Control Is KingThe following job advertisement was <a href="http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/aboutus/?fa=Employment">posted</a> on Tuesday (Dec 11 2012) by Dalkey Archive Press:<strong style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;"><br /></strong><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">The Press is looking for promising candidates with an appropriate background who: have already demonstrated a strong interest in literary publishing; are very well read in literature in general and Dalkey Archive books in particular; are highly motivated and ambitious; are determined to have a career in publishing and will sacrifice to make that career happen; are willing to start off at a low-level salary and work their way upwards; possess multi-dimensional skills that will be applied to work at the Press; look forward to undergoing a rigorous and challenging probationary period either as an intern or employee; want to work at Dalkey Archive Press doing whatever is required of them to make the Press succeed; do not have any other commitments (personal or professional) that will interfere with their work at the Press (family obligations, writing, involvement with other organizations, degrees to be finished, holidays to be taken, weddings to attend in Rio, etc.); know how to act and behave in a professional office environment with high standards of performance; and who have a commitment to excellence that can be demonstrated on a day-to-day basis. DO NOT APPLY IF ALL OF THE ABOVE DOES NOT DESCRIBE YOU.</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">We certainly seek people with relevant experience, but just as important or more so, we seek people who know what a job is, are able to learn quickly, are dedicated to doing excellent work, can meet all deadlines, and happily take on whatever needs to be done. Attitude and work habits, along with various skills, are just as important as experience and knowledge.</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Any of the following will be grounds for immediate dismissal during the probationary period: coming in late or leaving early without prior permission; being unavailable at night or on the weekends; failing to meet any goals; giving unsolicited advice about how to run things; taking personal phone calls during work hours; gossiping; misusing company property, including surfing the internet while at work; submission of poorly written materials; creating an atmosphere of complaint or argument; failing to respond to emails in a timely way; not showing an interest in other aspects of publishing beyond editorial; making repeated mistakes; violating company policies. DO NOT APPLY if you have a work history containing any of the above.</span></blockquote><strong style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;"><br /></strong><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">It makes for shocking reading, particularly given that the first paragraph of the advertisement states that successful applicants will, with perhaps an exception or two, be unpaid for an indeterminate length of time. But why be shocked? What is new here, after all? Is it not just another instance of neoliberal <i>control</i>, which puts to work, as Virno says,&nbsp;</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">the complex of inclinations, dispositions, emotions, vices, and virtues that mature precisely in a socialization outside of the workplace...: habituation to uninterrupted and nonteleological change, reflexes tested by a chain of perceptive shocks, a strong sense of the contingent and the aleatory, a nondeterministic mentality, urban training in traversing the crossroads of differing opportunities. These are the qualities that have been elevated to an authentic productive force.</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">&nbsp;("The Ambiguity of Disenchantment")</span></blockquote>Nothing new in Dalkey's job advert, then, but its&nbsp;<i>tone</i>, which has abandoned the saccharine speak of "opportunities" and "one big family" in favour of old-style laying-down of the law: control showing us at last that it's king.<br /><br />Well done Dalkey Archive, for effecting such a marvelous translation: of the worst of present times into the language of the worst of past times. SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-33751935994543433642012-12-11T05:02:00.001-08:002012-12-11T05:02:23.066-08:00Child Labour, Yummy Style<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; line-height: 150%; text-align: left;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial; line-height: 150%;">One aspect of current thinking on child-rearing, and now orthodoxy among health professionals and the “yummy mummies” they inspire, is what has been branded, “baby-led weaning,” whereby baby is encouraged to determine what, when and how she will make the transition from a milk to a solid-food diet. This means that at “mealtimes” – and it is important now to distance ourselves from this term, for mealtimes are an adult invention, not a </span><i style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial; line-height: 150%;">baby</i><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial; line-height: 150%;">-led one – the one person in the room yet to have even approached the age of reason is the one person in the room to decide upon the amount and kind of calories she will consume, in the process distributing those calories in a manner that constitutes them as things to play with as well as to eat, things to ingest in jest; enthusiasts for baby-led weaning defend it as the best way of making food </span><i style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial; line-height: 150%;">easy</i><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial; line-height: 150%;"> </span><i style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial; line-height: 150%;">and fun</i><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial; line-height: 150%;"> for baby and you.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">The most recent large-scale survey on the topic in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">UK</st1:place></st1:country-region>revealed that one quarter of all boys, and one third of all girls, between the ages of two and nineteen, are overweight or obese. And the problem, we are told, is getting worse, another recent survey predicting that the numbers are set to rise to sixty-three per cent of all children in the not-too-distant future. The question all but asks itself: how, when we are making such efforts to initiate our babies into the practice of eating and drinking, are our babies growing up to be more and more fat?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">But this is the wrong question. For, we should rather ask: why do we continue to make such efforts to initiate our babies into the practice of eating and drinking, when it is clear that, at the very least, these efforts do not improve our babies’ relationship to eating and drinking? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">If we ask the question in this way, then an answer very quickly presents itself. And it is this: the commitment to baby-led weaning flourishes, not <i>in spite of</i> the fact that it hands over control of food and drink to someone whose IQ, we are reliably informed, is less than twenty, not <i>in spite of</i> the fact that it results in food wastage and mess, not <i>in spite of</i> the fact that it makes it much more difficult to monitor the amount of food and drink that baby consumes, not <i>in spite of </i>the fact that mealtime loses definition and flows outwards into the whole of the waking day, and not <i>in spite of</i> the fact that it <i>at least</i> does not ameliorate the poor relationship to food and drink that leads to obesity in our children, but actually <i>because of</i> these effects. Baby-led weaning, like many of the practices recommended to child-rearers these days, is a very effective way of <i>preoccupying us with</i> <i>fun</i>, <i>burdening us with ease</i>, and generating low-lying but persistent feelings of <i>anxiety</i> by means of low-level but continuous opportunities for <i>gratification</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">Baby-led weaning: surely too innocent a practice to produce such effects? On the contrary, it is precisely by way of innocent practices that the populations of modern, western democracies, so attuned to explicit restrictions on their freedom, are controlled. Indeed, to the extent that baby-led weaning is actually <i>liberating</i> – of children, from culturally determined constraints upon eating and drinking; and of adults, from the expectation that they assume authority and impose agenda – it counts as that mode of control that is most effective of all. By removing the boundaries around those times of day when food is prepared and consumed, and around the various stages of maturity (which are put into a melting pot, out of which babies emerge as leaders and carers as led), it gives rise to <i>a</i> <i>grazing populace</i>, unused to the definition and deferral of gratification that separates us from all other animals. By literally <i>eating into</i> the time and space we might use for pursuit of the “higher pleasures,” as Mill famously described them, baby-led weaning fashions us as mere pigs at the trough.&nbsp; <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">Furthermore, when we consider these let-it-all-hang-out effects of baby-led weaning, in conjunction with what has been an immeasurable increase in recent times in the dissemination of<span class="apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><i>norms </i>of child-rearing<span class="apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>- how many calories are optimal for baby, what range of foods and textures are best for baby, when baby can be expected to hold her bottle, to hold her spoon, to hold her cup, and so on and so on – norms that, because they are thought of as <i>knowledge</i>, are not rejected as the unacceptable restriction of baby's freedom that a regimen of mealtimes and menus is regarded as, there emerges into full view just that combination, of “freedom”-where-there-should-be-constraint and “knowledge”-where-there-should-be-judgment, which is the tie that binds us now in our “liberty.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer writes, in <i>Truth and Method</i>, that “Man is characterized by the break with the immediate and the natural that the intellectual, rational side of his nature demands of him.” Quoting Hegel, he continues, “[Man] is not, by nature, what he should be.” The task for human beings, then, is what in German is called <i>Bildung</i>, which means something like, cultivation, edification, formation. We humans must <i>make ourselves human</i>, by turning from ourselves towards something more abstract, by “sacrificing particularity for the sake of the universal.” Gadamer continues:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-left: 36.0pt;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">To recognize one’s own in the alien, to become at home in it, is the basic movement of spirit, whose being consists only in returning to itself from what is other...Hence all...Bildung...is merely the continuation of a process of Bildung that begins much earlier. Every single individual who raises himself out of his natural being to the spiritual finds in the language, customs, and institutions of his people a pre-given body of material which, as in learning to speak, he has to make his own. Thus every individual is always engaged in the process of Bildung and in getting beyond his naturalness, inasmuch as the world into which he is growing is one that is humanly constituted through language and custom.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">Seen in this light – seen, that is, from a perspective for which getting beyond our naturalness is the quintessentially <i>human </i>task – baby-led weaning appears as a truly sinister development. For, to the extent that it would remove even the most fundamental ways in which the world is alien to us, it would also remove the essentially formative effect of our efforts to recognize ourselves in the alien. When the world comes to you, you do not have <i>to make yourself at home in the world</i>; when mealtimes are your times, you do not have to exert yourself in that basic movement of spirit which consists in returning to yourself from what is other. Gadamer is right to identify the building blocks of Bildung in those experiences we have when very young, in those early encounters with the language, customs and institutions of our society. He is mistaken, however, in his assumption that these early encounters can be relied upon to persist, for it is precisely these early encounters that <i>our</i> society is denying us, as the alien nature of language, customs and institutions ebbs away before the baby-led, child-centred, student-as-partner, flexible-working, design-your-own, just-for-you orthodoxy of our time. Baby-led weaning: the first step in a lifetime of failure to make ourselves human. &nbsp;&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">Ergonomics, it turns out, is the science of our time. Derived from two Greek words, <i>ergon </i>(work) and <i>nomoi</i>(natural laws), it describes the study of how to fit the world of work to the natural condition of the worker, rather than force the natural condition of the worker to form itself by work; the study, we might say, of how to make work <i>easy and fun</i>. Before we have the time or the space to exert ourselves, we are already achieving what we aimed to achieve. Our most basic instincts are responded to, so readily that we encounter no obstacle that we can make sense of, meet no resistance that we can comprehend, confront no limitation to make us feel that we are, after all, <i>only human</i>. But instinct is a poor substitute for effort. For we are not, by nature, what we should be; not feeling that we are <i>only human </i>reduces us to a mode of being <i>less than human</i>. The world into which we are growing is one that is no longer <i>humanly</i> constituted through language and custom, but <i>animally</i> constituted through <i>ease</i> and through<i> fun</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">It is worth quoting here, Matthew Crawford’s <i>The Case For Working With Your Hands</i>, whose argument for getting out of the office and into the workshop is perfectly aligned with my argument for <i>not</i>being led by baby. Pointing to the formative effects of engagement with materials as resistant, as <i>un</i>ergonomic, as old motorcycles, whose moral significance lies in their occasioning the exercise of human judgment, Crawford writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-left: 36.0pt;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">The necessity of such judgment calls forth human excellence. In the first place, the intellectual virtue of judging things rightly must be cultivated, and this is typically not the product of detached contemplation. It seems to require that the user of a machine have something at stake, an <i>interest</i> of the sort that arises through bodily immersion in some hard reality, the kind that kicks back. Corollary to such immersion is the development of what we might call a sub-ethical virtue: the user holds himself responsible to external reality, and opens himself to being schooled by it. His will is educated – both chastened and focused – so it no longer resembles that of a raging baby who only knows that he wants.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">A raging baby who only knows that he wants, even a raging baby who only knows <i>what </i>he wants, is not the extent of our intellectual and ethical potential; today’s endlessly-refreshed feeling that the world is <i>ours for the taking</i> is not liberatory but constraining, not uplifting but degrading.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">It turns out that the ever increasing problem of the heavy formlessness of our bodies, burdened with <i>ease</i> and laden with <i>fun</i>, is but a physical manifestation of an at least equally worrying heaviness and formlessness: of mind, of intellect, of soul, of spirit. If, in the not-too-distant future, sixty-three percent of all UK children, between the ages of two and nineteen, will be physically overweight or obese, than what percentage will be <i>intellectually</i>so? What percentage, in short, will have been denied the opportunity of <i>making themselves</i> <i>human</i>? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">To discover why it is that modern, western society conspires to bring our children to such a pass, one need look no further than to the work of the Italian radical, Paolo Virno, whose brilliant analysis of post-productive economies, in the essay “The Ambiguity of Disenchantment,” describes the manner in which they “put to work,” not the disciplined bodies and minds required by productive economies, but the so-called “soft” skills that constitute much of what now counts as labour, the “non-stop inertia,” as Ivor Southwood terms it, in which not having a job is almost indistinguishable from having a job (indeed, in the case of “zero-hour contract” jobs, entirely indistinguishable). And what are these “soft” skills? They are, according to Virno, <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-left: 36.0pt;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">the complex of inclinations, dispositions, emotions, vices, and virtues that mature precisely in a socialization outside of the workplace...: habituation to uninterrupted and nonteleological change, reflexes tested by a chain of perceptive shocks, a strong sense of the contingent and the aleatory, a nondeterministic mentality, urban training in traversing the crossroads of differing opportunities. These are the qualities that have been elevated to an authentic productive force. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">Think for a moment, of what it is for a baby to lead herself through weaning, “free” to eat when and where she feels like it and to try out whatever lies within her reach: habituation to nonteleological change?; reflexes tested by a chain of perceptive shocks?; a strong sense of the contingent and the aleatory?; a nondeterministic mentality?; training in coping with differing opportunities? “The ‘professionalism’ supplied and demanded today,” writes Virno, “consists of skills gained during the prolonged and precarious period preceding work.” And we are never too young, it seems, to begin to develop these skills, never too young to learn to be “professional,” never too young to be “put to work.” <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">&nbsp;“Work,” writes Gadamer, “is restrained desire”; hence its essentially <i>formative</i> effect. But Gadamer’s writing is dated. For, nowadays, work is <i>all your heart desires</i>: undefined; untimed; unspaced; uncertain; unsecured; unregulated. In short, <i>easy and fun</i>. When I asked an acquaintance of mine, who had recently changed jobs, how he found his new position, he replied: “Great! It’s so nice to be playing with grown-ups.” While the babes are at work, it seems the men are at play... <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Arial;">In Victorian times, when a baby was born, the expression used was that there was “a stranger in the house.” So indifferent-sounding to our ears! So cold and uncaring! In <i>our </i>times, when a baby is born, we immediately go “skin-to-skin,” holding our naked offspring against us within as few seconds as possible of her birth. But the urgency with which this first contact is promoted by those who assist and advise a woman during pregnancy and childbirth, ought to give us pause. What can be at stake? The answer: nothing short of ensuring that the world never feels like anywhere but <i>home</i>, and other people like anyone but <i>me</i>. The <i>little</i> <i>stranger</i> had at least the opportunity the <i>make herself at home in the world. </i>The <i>little</i> <i>stranger</i> had at least the chance to <i>make herself human</i>.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></div>SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-30120438547565940202012-11-28T06:05:00.000-08:002012-11-28T06:13:27.464-08:00For A Left With Some Sense<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.600000381469727px;">Nina Power, on <a href="http://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-209/feature-nina-power/">"the pessimism of time"</a>:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.600000381469727px;">As we defend those who await trial, or write to those in prison, or sit in courts, job centres and universities as futures are crushed all around, time may be all we have left: time in which to abolish</span><em style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.600000381469727px;">their</em><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.600000381469727px;">&nbsp;notion of time and replace it neither with Clark’s tragic present, nor Fukuyama’s ‘ideology of the future’ but with a life in which nobody seeks to make time measurable&nbsp;</span><em style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.600000381469727px;">at all</em><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.600000381469727px;">, for all time.</span></blockquote>The left has truly no future, when it deals, thus, not only in the <i>imagined</i> futures against which <a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/74/t-j-clark-for-a-left-with-no-future">Clark</a> would argue, but in <i>unimaginable</i>&nbsp;futures, "in which nobody seeks to make time measurable at all, for all time." Even when read, carefully, in the context of the article in which it appears, this is, literally, non-sense. It is not possible for us <i>even to imagine</i> a life in which time is not measured, or is immeasurable. What, then, is gained here by invoking it, above and beyond the credentials of being of the left?<br /><br />Never has Clark's argument in favour of "plain" speaking been more necessary. "Plain" speaking need not be banal, he says. He is right. For, nothing is as banal as nonsense.<br /><br />There is, as Power reports, a vacuum where the left ought to be. With conditions, in Greece for instance, so ripe, left-wing politics has so far been devastatingly ineffectual. One has the sense that the Greek people were yearning to vote to reject the bailout-government they (almost didn't) vote to accept. But, if it is understandably difficult to place one's trust in an <i>imagined</i>&nbsp;future, it is sheer nihilism to throw in one's lot with an&nbsp;<i>unimaginable </i>one. The left must begin to talk sense.<br /><br /><br />SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-44973851461583107382012-11-26T05:54:00.002-08:002012-11-26T06:03:26.365-08:00An Answer to Question TimeBill Readings, writing on Lyotard, tells the story of Herzog's film <i>Where The Green Ants Dream</i>, in which a group of Aborigines clashes with a mining company intent on setting up shop on Aboriginal land. The matter goes to court, which sits to establish who owns the land in question. The court is not lacking in impartiality; the Aborigines have a chance of a fair hearing. Except that they do not. Because Aborigines do not have a concept of land <i>ownership</i>. They claim the right to determine that the stretch of land is not mined for profit, but not on the basis of any sense of proprietorship over it. The impartiality of the court cannot therefore show impartiality to the Aborigines; the justice of the court cannot do them&nbsp;justice.<br /><br />The courtroom in Herzog's film stages what Lyotard calls <i>le</i>&nbsp;<i>differend</i>, that is, an event in which the difference between two positions&nbsp;is inexpressible, inaudible, invisible. The Aborigines are silenced, not because the court is unjust, but because the court is <i>just. </i>Justice for the <i>owners</i> of the land at the center of the dispute between the Aborigines and the mining company is necessarily injustice for the Aborigines. It is not, then, simply that the Aborigines cannot be heard - they are given full and ample time to make their case - but that a fundamental difference between the Aborigines and the mining company cannot be heard.&nbsp;That is <i>le differend</i>.<br /><br />And that is what unfolded last Thursday evening, in the studio - the Palace of Westminster, no less - for the BBC's <i>Question Time, </i>which<i>&nbsp;</i>staged an event in which the difference between the perspective within which debate in this country occurs and another perspective, that of Owen Jones, was inexpressible, inaudible, invisible.<br /><br />Do not mistake me: it is not that Jones was silent - of course not; nor is it that he was incoherent, or ineffectual in what he said - on the contrary, what he said was articulate, uplifting, inspiring. But the difference between what he said and what was said by everyone else seated at the table with him could not make itself heard, except, for one glorious moment, in the muffled raucousness of a woman at the back of the room. "Madam, don't shout out from the back. Let him [Charles Kennedy] speak," insisted David Dimbleby, in that moment giving as much airing as was going to be given to the defining aspect of the whole programme, that is, the absolute impossibility of the difference between Jones' position and that of everybody else being given the floor.<br /><br />Charles Kennedy, into one of whose long and vacuous answers the woman from the back was shouting, did not complain about the interruption. "This is the home of free speech," he said, to a round of applause from the audience (minus one, perhaps). And there it is: <i>le differend</i>. You cannot shout out because you must let others speak; you cannot answer because the question did not anticipate you; you cannot speak because you are free to do so. But only by shouting out and for the entire duration of the show, only by refusing to answer a single question that was asked, only by reneging upon everybody else's freedom to speak, would it have been possible, last Thursday evening, for where Owen Jones was "coming from" to enter the fray.&nbsp;As it was, the only dog in last Thursday evening's fight was neoliberal capitalism, with its grotesquely shameless mascot in the woman from&nbsp;<i>Dragon's Den</i>. And neoliberal capitalism is a perspective in which freedom of speech, above all else, is enshrined, with the result that nothing can be said against it because we must always "let it speak."&nbsp;(David Dimbleby, it must be admitted, is truly worth the job of overseer of all of this.)<br /><br />The woman at the back shouted at Charles Kennedy when he refused to support a fellow liberal democrat's claim, reported by Dimbleby, that the government cap on welfare payments is immoral. He doesn't make claims about morality or immorality, Kennedy replied; he leaves that to the Anglican bishops&nbsp;(rather careless of Kennedy, if only given that he described himself as a Catholic). But, he added, his liberal democrat colleague was "perfectly entitled to her view." And there it is in a nutshell: insofar as anything remains of right and wrong in a neoliberal capitalist society, it remains in this <i>generosity</i>, this <i>openness</i>, this <i>tolerance</i>, this <i>fairmindedness</i>, this <i>spirit of debate,&nbsp;</i>that makes everyone <i>entitled to their view</i>. But Owen Jones neither wanted to be entitled to his view, nor considered anyone else to be entitled to theirs. Owen Jones, you see,&nbsp;was dealing in a much more fulsome currency of right and wrong than that which flows through the society he finds himself in. &nbsp;But Owen Jones, for that reason, could not but fall outside the terms of <i>generosity, </i>of <i>openness</i>, of <i>tolerance</i>, of <i>fairmindedness</i>, of <i>the spirit of debate</i>.&nbsp;"We've heard a lot from you," said Dimbleby to Jones. "Please answer the question," said Dimbleby to Jones. But Jones was not nearly as time-consuming as others at the table; and he was much more direct in his answers than they were in theirs. What Dimbleby's impatience was confusedly responding to was Jones' lack of <i>generosity</i>, of <i>openness</i>, of <i>tolerance</i>, of <i>fairmindedness, </i>of <i>the spirit of debate, </i>Jones' refusal to allow that&nbsp;<i>everyone's entitled to their view.&nbsp;</i><br /><br />"What was significant about bbcqt last night was to see an ideological apparatus rendered visible and actively challenged," tweeted KPunk. "Ideology is about what we are made to think the Other thinks. Many share Owen's views, but ideology functions to make us think we're alone." But this is not quite it. The <i>ideological</i> differences were perfectly visible on Thursday's&nbsp;<i>Question Time</i>; we could have written the scripts for everyone there, with Tory making a case for cuts, Labour warning of the dangers of cuts, Liberal Democrat saying nothing at all of content, and the woman from <i>Dragon's Den</i> spouting the most ill-informed, unthought-out, individualistic, will-it-and-it-will-be-so, of drivel. What was not rendered visible was the <i>paradigm</i> within which these ideological differences are played out: neoliberal capitalism, which, far from being an ideology, is now the epoch, the era, the time in history, within which ideological differences are possible.<br /><br />When it is a question, as it was for Jones, of reneging upon the entitlement of others to hold their views; when it is a question, as it was for Jones, of undermining our right to free speech; when it is a question, as it was for Jones, of making claims for moral right and wrong; then it is a question, not of showing up that the Other thinks as we think, but of showing up that it doesn't matter that the Other thinks as we think because we're all thinking the same, especially when we think we're alone in what we think, especially, that is, when we would invoke the "freedom to think," the "entitlement to hold our view," in defense of what we think. Ideology-critique is a smoke screen, which forms into shapes like Charles Kennedy, Yvette Cooper, David Dimbleby, Ian Duncan-Smith, and the woman from <i>Dragon's Den</i>, but never ever into shapes like Owen Jones, which cannot be heard except, in the rarest of moments, indistinctly, in a muffled shouting out of ungenerosity, unopenness, intolerance, close-mindedness, and outright refusal to enter <i>the spirit of debate</i>.SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-77022449931941993952012-10-30T07:56:00.000-07:002012-10-31T05:48:30.655-07:00Where there are adults present, there is no sex; and where there is sex, there are no adults present<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.983333587646484px;"><a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/2012/10/27/andrew-ohagan/light-entertainment">Andrew O'Hagan's article</a> on the Jimmy Savile affair offers real insight into the ethos that facilitated Savile's conduct, an ethos that prevails not simply at the BBC but in British society as a whole.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.983333587646484px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.983333587646484px;">"Why is British light entertainment so often based on the sexualisation of people too young to cope?" asks O'Hagan. "Is it to cover the fact, via some kind of willed outrage, that the culture itself is largely paedophile in its commercial and entertainment excitements?" O'Hagan makes a very good case for thinking so. But there is more. For, the paedophilia of British culture extends beyond its commercial and entertainment excitements, to define social relations more generally.</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.983333587646484px;"><br /></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.983333587646484px;">One of the aspects of British culture most striking to the newcomer is <i>British humour</i>, which has, for the most part, the following two components: references to bodily function, including to sexual function; and silliness. The archetypal humourous moment occurs when your friend's dad rises from the dinner table, says something like: "Wee willy needs a wonking...," and exits to the bathroom, to delighted giggles from the home crowd. The newcomer is inevitably nonplussed; both the content and the style of this humour is, to her, quintessentially <i>childish, </i>combining the slightly-hysterical lack of wit and the slightly-knowing reference to body parts that are the lot, in other societies, of some older children during some few short years.&nbsp;</span></span><br /><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.983333587646484px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.983333587646484px;">But this characteristically British humour can be understood with reference to two further aspects of British culture that are striking to the newcomer.&nbsp;</span></span><br /><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.983333587646484px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.983333587646484px;">The first is <i>British sex</i>, which has at least the following components.&nbsp;<i>First: </i>an&nbsp;excessive&nbsp;<i>directness</i>&nbsp;of approach; none of those roundabout, ritualistic we-really-shouldn'ts, so fundamental for example to Catholic societies as actually to constitute sex in those societies, but instead a kind of get-your-kit-off-then lack of ceremony, a sort of lewd innocence, without sidestep or byroad. Sex, like other bodily functions, does not seem off-limits or private. <i>Second, </i>and clearly related: an all-pervasive&nbsp;<i>infantilism</i>. There is a disconcerting sense to the newcomer, of British families that are at once rather indifferent to each other and rather besotted with each other, at once lacking in family feeling and brimming with, well, <i>sexual tension</i>. Perhaps because parents seem to live somewhat separate lives - he watches the football; she Facebooks her friends - and lack a certain investment in each other, children are made to provide much of the sexual satisfaction available in British family life. With the result that there seems little content to <i>adult sexuality, </i>nothing for adults to grow into. This is most painfully evident in those who ought to be growing fast, in young men and women, no longer children themselves and with no children yet to focus upon.&nbsp;Young women of twenty, who we might think ought to be in the first full flush of sexual awareness, dress and demean themselves like ten-year-old girls, shuffling about in great sheepskin slippers, in leggings through which their undergarments are unconsciously to be seen, with hair and coffee cups and satchels and cardigans big enough to make them appear even more diminutive than their demeanor would suggest (they are often not diminutive in fact, heavier now than young women ever were). As for young men: it is hardly a coincidence that the urchin rent-boy look is more prevalent here than almost anywhere else in the world, done either for the office (suit that looks two sizes too small, long pointed shoes as if they're Dad's) or for the street (pipe-cleaner jeans worn a long, long way below the waist and hair tousled carefully in front of the face). &nbsp;</span></span><br /><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.983333587646484px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.983333587646484px;">The other aspect of British culture of relevance to understanding British humour is: <i>British</i> <i>reserve,</i>&nbsp;the&nbsp;total and utter formalization of almost all of social encounter; the absence of spontaneity, of banter, of anything like <i>conversation</i>&nbsp;except in the most rarefied and self-consciously "intellectual" of environments (where conversation tends to be dull). Nothing must stray&nbsp;from the path laid out for it; service at the supermarket is very polite and very efficient, but it does not expect to hear or to say the unexpected.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.983333587646484px;">Now, this last aspect of British culture, <i>British</i> <i>reserve,</i> would seem to be in conflict with at least the directness of&nbsp;<i>British sex</i>. But it is not. And not for the reason that Foucault gives for why the reserve of Victorian culture was not in conflict with the proliferation, during Victorian times, of categories, investigations, analyses and practices of sex. Foucault's question is: why, during an age which is associated most with prudery about the body generally and about sex in particular, was there such an explosion of ways of knowing about sex; why, when you weren't supposed to talk about it, was there so much being said? The answer Foucault gives is that knowing and doing are not necessarily liberatory, nor are not knowing and not doing necessarily prohibitive. The explosion of knowledge about sex and the explosion of sex followed from all of the ways in which people were put under surveillance to make sure they did not know about or have sex, just as the increase in knowledge about sex and in sex generated whole new categories of how not to know about or to have sex. Knowledge and power; licentious prohibition, prohibitive licentiousness.&nbsp;</span></span><br /><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.983333587646484px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.983333587646484px;">Now, to anyone from a Catholic country, as Foucault was, this Victorian society sounds familiar; indeed, to the extent that it began to employ the practice of <i>confession</i> (the "talking cure" is its secular equivalent), very very familiar indeed...&nbsp;</span></span><br /><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.983333587646484px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.983333587646484px;">But this is not how British reserve is related to British sex. Because the fact is that <i>there is no relation between British reserve and British sex</i>, except that <i>where there is reserve there is no sex, and where there is sex there is no reserve</i>. Or, we might say, w</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.983333587646484px;">here there are "adults" present, there is no sex; and where there is sex, there are no "adults" present. As for <i>British humour (</i>and British light entertainment, perhaps)&nbsp;that is what prevents the situation from imploding, by operating as a comforting reminder, when there are "adults" present, that the Queen's just "Cabbage," the BBC's just "Auntie," and we'll all be allowed out to play sometime very soon...</span>SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-66627566145261588592012-10-27T06:10:00.002-07:002012-10-28T06:24:03.525-07:00The Future Perfect/The Present LostAny kind of resistance to our present condition here in Britain must attempt to forge a relationship to time that does not assume the future perfect form of&nbsp;<i>we will have been</i>...<br /><br />The grotesque projections of our main political parties - of One Nation, of The Big Society - amount to nothing less than an effort to annihilate the present, by urging us to anticipate a time when <i>we will have been</i>...at a street party for the birth of our future king, out sweeping the leaves on our street with a band of neighbour-brothers, waving our troops off to some meaningful fight, welcoming our team home from some olympic feat...The tactic is genius, bringing utopianism in line with nostalgia, coopting gritty determination and cup-cake regret in a pincer offense against <i>now</i>.<br /><br />And the tactic goes unnoticed because it operates from the bottom up, not simply from Westminster down. We photograph the birthdays that <i>will have been</i> <i>wonderful</i>; we&nbsp;video the weddings that <i>will have been special</i>; we&nbsp;minute the meetings that <i>will have been right</i> <i>on message</i>; we&nbsp;write the books that <i>will have been</i>&nbsp;<i>misunderstood</i>; and we&nbsp;raise the child who <i>will have been</i> <i>the most important thing in my life</i>. The pathological mediation of these, our times, does not work simply by placing a screen between us and these, our times: it transports these, our times, into a future that does not proceed from them, in order to bury these, our times, in a past that does not precede them. Which causes "these, our times" to lose its reference...<br /><br />In her reply to <a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/74/t-j-clark-for-a-left-with-no-future">T. J. Clark</a>'s "For A Left With No Future," <a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/74/susan-watkins-presentism">Susan Watkins</a> issues a challenge to Clark's call for the Left to attend to the present, by observing that "the present itself, as a political moment, can only be grasped through its periodization; a process of differentiation that necessarily posits a future as well as a past." But this is the "necessary process" that must now be overthrown, for it is precisely the process through which the present itself, as a political moment, can <i>never</i>&nbsp;be grasped...<br /><br />In grammar, a tense is a category that locates a situation in time. But the future perfect tense <i>would lose&nbsp;our situation in these, our times</i>. We must cease to hope and cease to regret...SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-53085739242849854162012-10-23T06:02:00.003-07:002012-10-23T09:28:19.591-07:00It is right that...<br /><div style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/22/david-miliband-labour-speaking-in-code?CMP=twt_gu">John Harris of <i>The</i> <i>Guardian</i></a>, characterizes the rhetoric of the parliamentary Left:&nbsp;</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">Essentially, you sling together one or two cliches, at least one word or phrase (such as "reboot") that suggests you own a computer, and a couple of propositions that it would be impossible to argue against (a la "Feed the world" or "Make trade fair"). You then chuck in some apparently oxymoronic ideas, to make yourself look a bit clever.</blockquote>The ingredients here - truism, tautology, technology and oxymoron - just about summarize the pass to which the dominant mode of language, and therefore of experience, has now come. But not quite. For, Harris omits to mention the final piece of the puzzle: the superfluous insistence that "it is right that", as in, "I believe that <i>it is right</i> <i>that</i> we should make the bankers pay..." I challenge you to listen to one parliamentarian speak for more than one minute without witnessing the "it is right that" insertion.<br /><br />To what does all of this tend? <a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/74/t-j-clark-for-a-left-with-no-future">T.J. Clark</a> describes societies such as ours as being comprised of "isolate obedient 'individuals' with the technical support to match." And this is precisely how such 'individuals' speak.<br /><br />Full of the cynicism that is the hallmark of our times, a cynicism which has long since relinquished the expectation that anything actually means anything, we 'individuals' rarely motivate ourselves to anything other than cliche. If nothing means anything anyway (and I am not saying that this cynicism is <i>self-conscious</i>), the thing that is easiest to say is as good as anything else...<br /><br />But this is a cynicism tempered by a low-level but constant "feeling for" the marginalized (small children, nice-looking animals, stay-at-home-mummys, gay best-friends...), which "feeling for" achieves adequate expression via the kind of utterly abstract, all-inclusive, nonsense that has trickled down from the postmodern intellectualism of <i>difference, liminalities, </i>and <i>others - </i>"Feed the world" is just another way of saying, "We must theorize plurality within commonality..."<br /><br />The oxymoron, for its part, is merely the inverse of the truism and the tautology: what does it matter that one is inconsistent, when the grounds for consistency have receded and there can be no content to anything anyway; and abandoning the anachronistic demand that we avoid contradicting ourselves<i>&nbsp;</i>opens up so much space for communication that it's a no-brainer at this stage - "Sitting around the table as a family is the most important thing to us"; "I've already eaten"...<br /><br />As for the language of technology: it gives expression to that irresistible sense that the world is both at our finger-tips and beyond our reach, both there for us and utterly outside of our comprehension, both under and beyond our control - your new Virgin Media set-up is overwhelmingly responsive except for those times when it is bewilderingly unresponsive...<br /><br />But isolate, obedient individuals are not the stuff for society, as Clark argues; David Harvey (<i>A Brief History of Neoliberalism</i>)<i>&nbsp;</i>points to this as the reason for the upsurge in popularity of neoconservatism in the US, which effectively adds to the neoliberal pot the important ingredients of religious fundamentalism and/or militant patriotism, as top-down galvanizers of an otherwise dangerously-unconnected populace. There are versions of both of these galvanizers at play in Britain too -&nbsp;albeit, less religious and more secular-moral, (slightly) less militant and more remember-to-smile Olympic. And their catchphrase is: "It is right that..."SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-22070865400615534652012-10-19T06:30:00.001-07:002012-10-19T06:30:31.067-07:00We are living in an immaterial world...So the tap in your kitchen starts to drip. You call the plumber. He tells you, there's no way to fix it - "No such thing as replacing the washer these days. Have to replace the whole thing." You duly go to the DIY superstore, where you are confronted with a range of tap options so wide that you could not have imagined it. There is, it seems, a tap for every tap-whim, a tap for every tap-fancy, a tap for every tap-fetish. But, without whim, fancy or fetish, you do exactly what it has been predicted you would do: choose a middle-of-the-range tap, a decent tap, a tap that does what it says on the tin.<br /><br />But there's the rub. The tap you buy does not do what it says on the tin. One year later, it too begins to drip. Only now, you are not so naive as to call the plumber to fix it. There's no such thing as replacing a washer these days, after all. So, in time with your new tap's tortuous percussion, you reflect on how <i>im</i>material is this world we are living in...<br /><br />We have learnt by now to be concerned at how our practices of consumption have degraded all of those areas of human life that ought not to be merely for sale: education, health, family feeling, romantic love...But even this concern is out of date. For, <i>our practices of consumption too are now degraded</i>, by almost totally ephemeral practices of exchange, whose <i>material</i> component is all but negligible. Of least importance in the story of the tap is <i>the&nbsp;tap</i>. Of greatest importance in the story of the tap is: the affirmation of the endless obsolescence of the <i>things</i>&nbsp;to which we might, if we got the chance, moor ourselves; and the impression, of a level of response to our particular wants so replete as to feel to us tailor-made. The story of the tap, in short, tells the tale of how anything in which we might have invested ourselves is taken from our grasp, substituted for by the spectacle of all of the ways in which we are about to get precisely the thing we wish for. This is what consumption has come to: the endlessly-refreshed feeling that the world <i>is ours for the taking</i>.<br /><br />Ergonomics is the science of our time. It designs a world that comes to meet us. Before we have the time or space to exert ourselves, we are already getting what we want. Our most instinctual movements are responded to. With the result that we encounter no obstacle that we can make sense of, meet no resistance that we can comprehend, come up against no limitation that can make us feel that we are, after all, <i>only human</i>. But instinct is a poor substitute for endeavour. For, as Hegel said, "we are not, by nature, what we should be." <i>Not</i> feeling that we are <i>only human</i>&nbsp;reduces us to a state of being that is&nbsp;<i>less than human</i>.<br /><br />If I could only have dismantled that tap, and <i>turned my gaze from myself</i> for just a moment in an effort to understand its workings. But instead, I went to the DIY superstore, and turned my gaze on a range of options so vast as to be comprehensible only as encompassing a tap <i>just made for me. </i>Instead, in other words, I <i>turned my gaze once more upon myself</i>. And now that the tap drips once more, I shall turn my gaze once more upon myself...&nbsp;<br /><br />Being materialistic had its merits: it did at least give us some <i>things</i> to contemplate...SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-58957074403989207462012-10-12T05:37:00.002-07:002012-10-12T08:59:54.571-07:00Swear More: On the Hyperinflation of DissentSome recent contributions on Twitter, intended as a show of dissent to the three main-party political conferences, have been underwhelming, stark evidence of a Left that cannot find its voice.<br /><br />One of the remarkable features of key speeches given at the party conferences was a more-than-ever "presidential" style: big on embarrassingly mindless rhetoric, and featuring personal anecdotes and intimate details. The way to win votes now, it appears, is to emote without content, exhort without substance, and look people straight in the eye without having anything else to say. This is not surprising. Britain, after all, is in the full swing of post-Fordist, corporatist, "non-stop inertia," in which mode what counts is <i>feeling it</i>. Genuine, innovative responses to the financial crisis seem a lifetime away; any kind of response to the environmental crisis is all but unheard of: there is nothing being done, nothing to be done, but proceed (towards a doomsday that will be riddled with the same old socio-economic divisions that have been the great achievement of neoliberalism) with the feeling that we are all one big family, one nation, striving together, and having a <i>lovely</i>&nbsp;time...<br /><br />What can be done in opposition to this tide of <i>yummy nihilism </i>is indeed a difficult question. But, let me offer an opinion as to what at least ought <i>not </i>to be indulged in: the kind of name-calling, negativist, endlessly cynical, insatiably dissatisfied, <i>ad hominem</i> rhetoric that has characterized some of the offerings on Twitter in recent times. Not because such rhetoric is "exactly what you'd expect from loony lefties," but because such rhetoric is exactly what you'd expect from <i>anyone</i>. Ed Miliband spoke, totally cynically, utterly emptily, about one nation channeling the Olympic spirit into the forging of a new age; where, then, is the gain in speaking, totally cynically, utterly emptily, about the fucking totally cynical, fucking one nation crap, typical of fucking New Labour fucking anyway? Politicians now, like the people <i>they do&nbsp;represent</i>, are subject to the hyperinflation of experience that demands that we lay ourselves prostrate with hyperbole when the slightest occasion presents itself to do so; any kind of resistance, then, must begin by attempting to reclaim the voice of reasonable dissent. Think of it as dealing with an infant (we are all infants in the one big happy nation, after all): when a child begins to act unreasonably, you can either meet senseless volume on its own terms and contribute to the kind of headless escalation in which the child, much more than you, will feel at home; or you can value mature reasonableness sufficiently to remain its representative throughout. <i>Or</i>, you can strike a blow. Not so easy nowadays, of course, but...<br /><br />In these times, when the substance of what is said is almost endlessly exchangeable, when we are all of us inured to the "it could always be otherwise" orthodoxy of our soft-skills society, <i>style is all</i>. And style now is personal, emotional, hyperbolic. That is enough for us to feel at home. Michael Gove is a friend, a stalwart to steer the course of our nation's children's and grandchildren's education through these troubled waters and out into a new and calmer future; or Michael Gove is a fucking fiend, a jumped-up, typical Tory, Latin-pushing prissy...Doesn't make much difference, you see. Once you've got the style right - personal, emotional, hyperbolic - it hardly matters whether you surf or ski...SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-60622196618792369462012-10-10T05:50:00.001-07:002012-10-10T05:55:17.182-07:00Smile, though your heart is aching...SMILE MORE: this was chalked in bold blue yesterday, on the path from the University to the first-year students' halls of residence. A sinister reprise of the mantra of one of those helpers who stood outside the venues for London's Olympic Games, recorded by the BBC news in the act of encouraging everyone to REMEMBER TO SMILE. Time has moved on since then. Not much time, it is true, but enough to have undermined the value of merely remembering to smile. Now, we must remember to <i>smile more</i>...<br /><br />When I was at school, a teacher used to reprimand us pupils for misusing the word "love": "I <i>love</i>&nbsp;Home and Away," "I <i>love </i>Mars Bars," etc.&nbsp;He found it objectionable that a verb expressing an extreme of regard was being cheapened by its association with instances of mild appreciation. But time has moved on since then. During which, at some point when no-one was paying much attention, the gold standard for language was abandoned, meaning cut its ties with anything like a reality, and the hyperinflation of experience was set in awful train.<br /><br />Remember to smile, smile more, smile even more, laugh out loud, laugh until your face hurts, laugh until your head falls off, laugh until you cry.SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-84429919036027281932012-10-05T06:05:00.001-07:002012-10-05T06:05:44.111-07:00We are all of us "conservatives," "liberals," and "socialists"..."<a href="https://twitter.com/AuerbachKeller/status/253696113125769217">Conservatives romanticize the past, liberals romanticize the present, socialists romanticize the future."</a> <br /><br />Nicely said. But it is missing a fourth phase: "...and we all of us romanticize <i>nihilism.</i>"<br /><br />Our society has&nbsp;put to work<i> all</i> of the modes of romanticizing named by Auerbach: total dearth of meaning goes hand in hand with a sentimentalizing, feminizing, nostalgia for an invented yet generic past, as we look out the most momentary of salvational teloi for our otherwise forsaken lives; lack of engagement with and commitment to anything finds its mode of being in an "it could always be otherwise" openness to countless alternative, "minority," principles and practices; and the fact that there is nothing satisfying to be had for us here and now is smoothed over by an infantilizing orientation towards the future...next time, at Christmas, when I retire, when the economy picks up...<br /><br />We are <i>all of us</i>&nbsp;"conservatives," "liberals," and "socialists"; for, "conservatism," "liberalism" and "socialism" are the ways in which we find the utter nihilism of our lives to be, not just bearable, but meaningful, comforting, <i>lovely</i>...<br /><br />These are the days "when nihilism speaks of happiness..." (<a href="http://libcom.org/files/jeune-fille.pdf">Tiqqun</a>).SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-2285246159245233892012-09-28T06:11:00.000-07:002012-09-28T15:59:06.501-07:00Lord, Make Me An Instrument...The University's counterpoint to this year's rise in student fees so far involves a dramatic increase in what were already grotesquely numerous bureaucratic exercises. The student is now to be a "partner" in the delivery of his/her education, a reconceptualization that serves once again, to undermine the little that is left of lecturers' professionalism and authority, and conveniently to generate a whole swathe of new procedures and documents to make it real. We are not far now from an explicit acknowledgment of the situation that has been implicitly in place for some time: the student as "author" of his/her education.<br /><br />But the total and utter meaninglessness of almost everything done by the University now is not at all the result of the University's having signed up to a disastrous goal - that of satisfying students. Nor is it the result of its continuing to fail to realize this goal&nbsp;despite the most cumbersome and humiliating of efforts to do so&nbsp;- the "student" is now <i>constituted</i> in part by a low-lying but persistent sense of dissatisfaction. No, the total and utter meaninglessness now of everything results from the fact that <i>there is no goal, not even a wrongheaded one</i>. The University thinks up new plans, demands greater accountability, looks for more transparency, sets new standards, and devises new opportunities...all as a kind of self-sustaining system which, while serving no end, is rather rapidly replacing all of the ends that the University used to serve. Research in any meaningful sense has all but disappeared, replaced by exhausting and exhaustive Research Exercise Frameworks and funding bids; teaching in any meaningful sense has disappeared into continual efforts to accord with constantly changing teaching standards and their measurement; and learning, well...you do the math.<br /><br />The University, to this extent, has about it a kind of fascination, akin to what Tiqqun describes in respect of <a href="http://libcom.org/files/jeune-fille.pdf">"The YoungGirl"</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">...fascinating in the same way as everything that expresses its being closed in upon itself, a mechanical self-sufficiency or an indifference to the observer; like an insect, an infant, a robot, or Foucault's pendulum.</blockquote>Like some, if not all, of these instances of mechanical and indifferent self-sufficiency, however, fascination with the University is experienced best from a certain middle-distance. Up close, it just numbs the soul.<br /><br />The orthodox philosophical move, over the past century or more, for those of the European tradition of course, has been to attempt to loosen what was perceived to be the very limiting and ideologically problematic hold over us, exercised by "instrumental reason": human intelligence, we have learnt and taught, is not simply a tool, which we must practice using skillfully so that it may bring about the ends to which it has been assigned; human intelligence is capable of deliberating upon the ends to which it ought to be assigned! We are not mere animals, we have learnt and taught, to be trained in the realization of certain goals; we are human beings capable of determining which goals we should attempt to realize! Of course, deliberation upon ends, determination of goals, is no science, we have gone on to learn and to teach...it requires time and thought, it requires dialogue and consideration, it will never result in any certainty and must always be prepared to revise its findings in the face of challenge and of change. But how much richer such thinking, how much more worthy of human beings, than the mere adding of two and two to arrive at a pre-assigned four! Instrumental reason, we have learnt and taught, has made machines out of men.<br /><br />But times have changed. Now, in the midst of the University's furious activity, into which it would draw all in its jurisdiction, activity that was always all for nought, the idea that human intelligence might be raised up to serve some end, albeit formulaic and pre-given, seems like revolution! The idea that something might be done, or, which is as good, <i>fail to be done</i>, feels like the most radical thing of all. And all of that philosophical high-dudgeon over instrumentalism begins to leave a bad taste in the mouth...arguing as it does against the very thing that the University has gradually eradicated and for a kind of endless, circular process of inquiry that suddenly seems very familiar and more than a little&nbsp;<i>fascinating</i>...<br /><br />As the University, so its student, who now cannot <i>fail</i>. The grade - <i>fail </i>- is almost completely anachronistic, assigned only when the institution is at a loss to know what to say. And even then, it is only ever a place-marker, a brief treading of water while the incessant splashing about the place begins all over again...<br /><br /><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/74/t-j-clark-for-a-left-with-no-future">T.J. Clark's call</a> for a reanimation of the experience of defeat is so much more than a piece of gloomy-sounding rhetoric. For, defeat, <i>failure,</i>&nbsp;implies that there were ends, however insignificant, that might have been met. This is why, as Clark says, the tragic perspective is not depressing. Tragedy - greatness come to nothing - presupposes greatness; failure - ends not met - presupposes ends. Oh Lord, in these times, make me an instrument of <i>something...</i>SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-79877781260765292832012-09-21T06:39:00.003-07:002012-09-25T04:39:37.392-07:00Against "Artivism": Response to Chantal Mouffe<span style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial;">Chantal Mouffe's recent article&nbsp;</span><a href="http://truthisconcrete.org/texts/?p=19"><span style="font-family: Arial;">"Truth is Concrete"</span></a><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial;">&nbsp;argues against the "exodus" strategies recommended by Italian Autonomists like Paolo Virno, and in favour of an aesthetico-political strategy of engagement with institutions. Her view is that, despite the frequently-aired idea that aesthetic practices and the institutions that foster them are now so utterly in thrall to capitalist hegemony that they are best abandoned, there is still available to and through art practices the possibility of resistance to the post-Fordist status quo. "Artivism" is still an option, says Mouffe: "By putting aesthetic means at the service of political activism, this 'artivism' can be seen as a counter-hegemonic move against the capitalist appropriation of aesthetics." &nbsp;</span><br /><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial;">But there is, I think, a problem about Mouffe's understanding of the nature of post-Fordist "hegemony." For, part of the force of post-Fordist societies is their utter transformation of the mode in which hegemony operates and the consequent challenge issued to those who would attempt to resist it. Much of twentieth-century philosophy has emerged from the recognition that, as Mouffe puts it, "things could always have been otherwise and every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities. This is why," she continues, every order "is always susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices that will attempt to disarticulate it so as to establish a different hegemony." The task, then, has been (and still is, in Mouffe's view) to find effective ways, philosophically, politically, to "disarticulate," that is, to distance ourselves from what is nearest to us in order to gain some sense of other possibilties.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial;">But what happens when nothing is nearest to us? What happens when nothing has been excluded? What happens when there is no hegemony? This, in effect, is the situation that Virno describes, in<span class="apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/38672798/Radical-Thought-in-Italy">"The Ambivalence of Disenchantment"</a>, when he says:&nbsp;</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial;">A process of uprooting without end, engendered by the mutability of contexts marked for the most part by conventions, artifices, and abstractions, overturns this scheme [the scheme of "disarticulation" a la Mouffe] and submits it to an inexorable practical critique...Today's modes of being and feeling lie in an&nbsp;</span><i style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial;">abandonment without reserve to our own finitude</i><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial;">. Uprooting...constitutes the substance of our contingency and precariousness...It constitutes an ordinary condition that everyone feels because of the continual mutation of modes of production, techniques of communication, and styles of life.</span></blockquote></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Our "ordinary condition" now is one of utter precariousness, of a constant shifting of perspectives, of fleeting communications and passing commitments. To pitch against what is effectively an&nbsp;<i>ahegemony,</i>&nbsp;Mouffe's artistic/political "diversity of practices and interventions operating in a multiplicity of spaces," creation of "a multiplicity of agnostic spaces...where new modes of identification are made available," "articulation of different modes of intervention in a multiplicity of places," and so on, is rather like trying to mop up water with water. Counter-hegemonic practices are now the stuff of hegemony. In this context, it is worth quoting David Harvey, who regrets the so-far ineffectual opposition to neo-liberal hegemony and mentions as culpable, "all those postmodern intellectual currents that accord without knowing it, with the White House line that truth is both socially constructed and a mere effect of discourse."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Mouffe refers to Foucault's insight that, in modern production, not just the control of bodies but "the control of souls is crucial." But our souls are now made up of a constant sense that "things could always have been otherwise"; for that reason, the "artivist" achievement of highlighting that "things could always have been otherwise" has little chance of changing our souls.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">"I strongly believe," Mouffe says, "that in examining the relation between art and politics, it is necessary to adopt a pluralistic perspective." But Mouffe's strong belief is subject to criticism from&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.zero-books.net/books/art-kettle-the">The Art Kettle</a></i>'s claim&nbsp;that our ordinary condition in post-Fordist societies amounts to a "creativity continuum." The phrase is a version of the "carceral continuum" that Foucault describes as characteristic of early-capitalist societies, which have at their core the prison, a nugget of enclosure that spreads outwards to regulate other areas of life. In our late-capitalist society, it is not a nugget of enclosure, but an outside of free-spirited, playful, <i>pluralistic</i>,&nbsp;"things could always have been otherwise," thinking and acting, that has spread<span class="apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><i>inwards</i>, becoming what is left of a status quo, becoming, in effect, an&nbsp;<i>a</i>hegemony. Our society has "put to work," to use Virno's phrase, the very states of mind that have defined the creative, the aesthetic, in our time. Mouffe's "artivism" would be on the payroll of capital.&nbsp;</span><o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><br /></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">It is possible to show this in summary fashion, by comparing the constellation of feelings that Virno identifies as comprising, now, "ordinary" experience, with the constellation of feelings that Kant identifies as comprising aesthetic experience.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><u>Virno on ordinary experience</u>:&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial;">Opportunism</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">: so feverish, Virno says, as to be almost entirely absract, disincarnate; particular opportunities are endlessly interchangeable and provide merely the pretexts for “a spirit that grants the dignity of a salvational telos to every fleeting occasion.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial;">Cynicism</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">: which places in full view, not only the rules that structure the parameters of action, not only our prejudices, but also the unfoundedness/conventionality of those rules or prejudices, so that “abstract knowledge accumulates before experience” – this is no noble mastering of our condition but a general feeling of awareness of the rules of the game, to which we nonetheless adhere perfectly, if only momentarily.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial;">Fear</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">: a constantly operative anxiety/adaptability and insecurity/flexibility, born of our awareness that our most momentary adherances will be undercut by their unfoundedness and exchangeability.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial;">A sense of belonging</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">: directly proportional to the lack of anything to which to belong, a sense of belonging as such.</span><o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><br /></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><u>Now Kant on aesthetic experience</u>:</span><o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><br /></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial;">Opportunism,</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">&nbsp;or a certain form of subjectivism: the object of the experience is merely its occasion, towards the existence of which we are utterly indifferent;</span><o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><br /></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial;">Cynicism</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">&nbsp;or disinterestedness: our human purposes are felt to be mere artifices when juxtaposed with intimations of a purpose that is other than, that is&nbsp;<i>more&nbsp;</i>than, human;</span><o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><br /></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial;">Fear</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">, that the setting aside of human purposes will reveal only a mess of chaos and contingency;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial;">A sense of belonging</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">, to a grand design, a salvational telos, generated by intimations of order, of purpose, when there might have been nothing but that mess of chaos and contingency.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">In short, our ordinary experience, the hegemony against which Mouffe would have us pitch aesthetic resistances, is aesthetic to its core; the theoretical and practical "articulation of different modes of intervention in a multplicity of places"&nbsp;would&nbsp;simply add fuel to the post-Fordist fire.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Harvey</span></st1:place></st1:city></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">'s exhortation is for us to trump the postmodern intellectualism that is so compatible with the neo-liberal status quo, and acknowledge that "there is a reality out there and it is catching up with us fast." Because<span class="apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><i>the concrete truth</i><span class="apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>is that things could&nbsp;<i>not&nbsp;</i>always have been otherwise. Things could only have been what they are. Multiplicity, plurality, contingency, contextuality...are for the kind of "high style" intellectual activity upon which post-Fordist hegemony thrives. Much better to develop<span class="apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/74/t-j-clark-for-a-left-with-no-future">Clarke</a>'s tragic sense that things could not have been otherwise than what they are, and plumb for the kind of "middle wisdom" that responds to this sense with only the certainty of defeat as its guide.&nbsp;</span><o:p></o:p></div><u1:p></u1:p>SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8156305210592294239.post-54275093675123687162012-09-15T04:40:00.000-07:002012-09-18T04:55:47.022-07:00How Eccentric Was Anna Piaggi? <div style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /><img alt="Anna Piaggi: Anna Piaggi attends the Missoni fashion show Milan Fashion Week " height="320" id="main-picture" src="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2012/8/7/1344353817057/Anna-Piaggi-attends-the-M-033.jpg" width="213" /></div><br />Anna Piaggi, the Italian icon of fashion, died last month aged 81. On Tuesday, <i>The Guardian</i> published her obituary, which described her style as “electrified with eccentricity.” But Anna Piaggi was not eccentric. Anna Piaggi was utterly conventional. <br /><br />Piaggi’s compatriot, Paolo Virno, describes the conventional mode of living and of working (and, I would add, of thinking) in our times, as <i>virtuosity</i>. For Virno, the lack of an end towards which our activity is oriented (in work and in life), together with the quintessentially public nature of work and of life, the absolute requirement that there be witnesses to our activity, means that we are all now in the mode of performers, active but non-productive, communicative because non-productive, active insofar as we are communicative. In other words, since we no longer typically make things (eg. cars), since we no longer typically do things (eg. eat family meals), all we have are our communications about making things and doing things. To those still in the mode of making and doing things, these communications appear as substitutes and are therefore painful to witness; to such people, communications about making and doing can never substitute for making and doing. But, to those not still in the mode of making and doing (most people in&nbsp;Britain, for example), these communications are glorious, and necessary. Without them, there would be nothing. They are the stuff of our times (not merely substitutes for the lack of stuff in our times). We are all <i>virtuosi</i>, whose activity amounts to occasioning the witnessing of our activity. <br /><br />And so Piaggi was the most conventional figure of all, one who herded the wearing of clothes, from the 1950s when clothes were still steeped in purposes, through the 60s and beyond, when clothes have come away from all purpose and are worn entirely communicatively. Piaggi “used clothes as theatre,” <i>The Guardian</i> tells us; she was “a great performer.” Piaggi, to use Virno’s term, was a fashion <i>virtuosa</i>, without concern for the ends to which the wearing of clothes has been oriented and, therefore, absolutely in requirement of dazzling a public. Piaggi did not dress to cover herself, to keep warm, to respond to prevailing concerns of her time, to enhance her figure or offend her friends. No wartime “wiggle” here, to make the most of scanty stores of cloth, and, by eschewing excess, to be in sympathy with those in the fight, and to show a full figure to those in need of something for sore eyes. No “New Look” here, to celebrate the end of rationing, and take joy in a new dawn, and return women to near-girlhood following their second great emancipation of the century. Nothing so purposeful. Nothing but the staging of end-less communications. Anna Piaggi dressed to be seen to be dressed. She dressed because she did not dress. She dressed to know she existed. She dressed, therefore she was.<br /><br />“Spectacle,” in the Situationist sense, is, for Virno, the key to our virtuosic world; the commodification of our capacity for communication is all around, as post-Fordist capitalist societies extract surplus value from “soft” “feminine” “skills” that are still thought of as “priceless” and “personal.” And Piaggi was certainly a spectacle, an instance of the most conventional move of our time, that is, the removal of communications from the contexts in which they might have communicated something, in which they might have made something or done something or been part of something, in order to mummify them as communications in and of themselves. To say it is enough. Because there is now a value merely in saying it. Commodification: that was the business Piaggi was in. She was about as eccentric as a hedge-fund manager. <br /><br />“Professional play” is how Piaggi described her mode of dress. And she was right.&nbsp;Play may be very serious and involve&nbsp;all kinds of rules (this is not just an anything-goes scenario), but&nbsp;it is&nbsp;without end. Play is not “for” anything other than itself. In all times before these, activity that was not for anything other than itself was, for the most part, consigned to children. But now, grown-ups do it too. In fact, they do nothing else. Anna Piaggi looked like a child who has raided her mother’s wardrobe and daubed on her mother’s make-up. Because Anna Piaggi was a child, just like us all. The question is, when, how, will we ever grow up? SMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10380255793072511410noreply@blogger.com0